To witness the healing power of music, you don’t have to look any further than the spontaneous outbursts of singing by thousands of people as they watched in horror and disbelief at the flames shooting out of the Notre-Dame Cathedral on Monday. In these gentle voices, there is the sound of sorrow and grief in […]

Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett performed some musical magic in 1975 at the Cologne Opera House in Germany. For more than an hour, he played enthralling solo—and his entire performance was an improvisation, from first note to last. A recording of his feat called The Köln Concert became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all […]

Music has long been associated with mental, physical, and spiritual health. And someday soon, doctors may start prescribing their patients a dose of music to accompany more conventional medicine. The Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine, an interdepartmental collaboration between the School of Medicine and Peabody Conservatory, is actively exploring the science and therapeutic […]

Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society Panel on Music and the Brain.  Pictured from left to right:  Charles Limb, Pat Metheny and Richard Huganir. The 2018 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA started on a spectacular note this November, featuring the legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny in the public lecture Dialogues Between Neuroscience […]

Jamal Davis, a young singer-songwriter, always dreamed of pursuing a career in music. Jamal was working to get an audition for The Voice when he found himself in need of a heart transplant for his congenitally enlarged heart. Jamal went to the University of Florida (UF) Health Shands Hospital, where his nurses enlisted him in […]

How does the brain process sensory information? What gives humans the unique ability to create and respond to art? Can architecture effect healing, creativity and learning? These are questions at the heart of the Science of the Arts, a program hosted by the Brain Science Institute that brought together researchers and artists in a series […]

Sound Health: Music and the Mind is a collaboration of the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center designed to elevate the science of music and its relationship to health. On June 2, a lively crowd of musicians, music lovers and music therapists gathered at the Kennedy Center to kick off a weekend of […]

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis is Professor and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas. Her research approaches music from the perspective of cognitive science. She is interested in the interface between musical structure and engagement, especially in listeners without formal training, and especially as it occurs dynamically across the course of the […]

In a marriage of science and art, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute are helping advance the study of neuroaesthetics, an emerging field that seeks to understand why we find meaning in art, dance, music, and architecture. Understanding the neurobiological foundations for aesthetic experience is at the root of a burgeoning discipline known […]

How much do we know about what happens in our brain as we experience the world around us and how can we use that knowledge to impact our lives? Welcome to the place where we seek to find answers to those questions and where the arts and brain sciences intersect — the International Arts + Mind Lab […]