Members of the Amygdaloids rock band call their music “heavy mental” for good reason. Lyrics, composed by the pioneering group of New York University scientists, are all about the functions and foibles of the brain.
Joseph LeDoux, the group’s co-founder, isn’t personally fond of heavy-metal music, but he certainly qualifies as a heavy in the mentally challenging field of neuroscience. His multi-institutional Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, funded for several years by Bethesda’s National Institute of Mental Health, investigates the physical mechanisms behind such states of mind as panic attacks and stress-related illnesses.
The other three performers — an established environmental scientist and two postgraduate researchers — are no slouches, either.
Audience members attending the band’s only public appearance in the District to date, Jan. 3 on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, witnessed a laid-back, good-humored bunch of jeans-clad musicians playing fancy amplified guitars and drums while singing songs with titles such as “Mind-Body Problem, “Memory Pill” and “All in a Nut.”
The latter is the group’s opening number, the theme of this educational-entertainment tour de force, a reference to the almond-sized-and-shaped brain structure called the amygdala that is associated with a person’s mental and emotional state.
The song “An Emotional Brain” — which closes the program along with an appeal to buy the group’s CD — begins with the words “An emotional brain is a hard thing to tame. It just won’t stay in its place. Every time I think I’ve got it, it gives me another face.”
Mr. LeDoux and guitarist Tyler Volk, a science director of environmental studies and associate professor of biology at NYU, talk briefly between numbers to complement the album summary in the program.
A song titled “A Trace” refers to work by memory researchers investigating how certain memories can’t be eliminated and persist in a debilitating fashion, resulting in some painful, psychiatrically charged conditions, the program notes.
Listening in on the live feed that evening from his office was Richard Nakamura, NIMH’s deputy director, who first met Mr. LeDoux in graduate school, where both were working toward doctorates in psychology.
In a telephone interview, he praised both the musical agility and scientific accomplishments of his former colleague, saying that, along with others, Mr. LeDoux “made an enormous dent in understanding the circuitry in fear conditioning and was important in bringing attention to the role the amygdala plays … its ability to make a linkage between a fear stimulus and our behavior reaction to that fear,” which is what is involved in post-traumatic stress disorder.
“We do have a sense of reaching out [through music] with our knowledge of science and how it shouldn’t be cloistered off,” says Mr. Volk, who met Mr. LeDoux as a fellow author of popular books on science. They jammed together before forming the band about two years ago, when they were joined by drummer Daniela Schiller and guitarist Nina Galbraith Curley, both NYU postdoc neuroscientists studying the brain’s emotion and memory functions.
Asked to describe the effect on his own brain of playing the Amygdaloids’ soft-rock-cum-blues, Mr. Volk says, “Music is a part of me, probably a module in my brain that is unique and different from language, although it uses language. I enjoy a lot of music that doesn’t have lyrics at all.”
When he leaves the group’s practice session in a room the musicians rent near Madison Square Garden, he says, he finds himself “in a completely different state, almost a different life, something I can rely on no matter how tired I am.”
“I would think there is a brain effect,” he adds, mentioning a recent best-seller by neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin of McGill University, “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.” The book examines at length the research done to date on the relationship between music and the mind. Like Mr. Levitin, Mr. Volk was drawn to music early in life — learning guitar “because it was fun.” Both found this interest before making their marks as scientists.
Mr. LeDoux, a disc jockey in high school, also recalls an early “strong relationship to music. I remember everything from the past. When a song comes on, I can identify the first few notes and come up with the title and artist if it comes from an early period in my life, in the mid-’60s.”
That is a long way, of course, from his current professional preoccupation. He initiated the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety to study cellular and molecular mechanisms of emotions in rats and apply the results to studies in humans, and he recently set up the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU to understand the genetics and development of fear and anxiety.
He has more modest goals for understanding how the Amygdaloids’ music affects their audiences.
“I like to say that you can read a chapter in a book the night before sleep — or listen to one of our songs for three minutes while having a beer and probably get the gist [of what the song means], although obviously not in as much detail,” he says. “You get the impression of broad strokes and have fun. We deal with some pretty heady things in ’Mind Body Problem’ and ’Inside of Me’ that can stimulate you to think and evaluate your own self-consciousness and what it all means and what control you have over it.”
Ms. Curley was on vacation and couldn’t be reached, and Ms. Schiller replied by e-mail, describing the music as “catchy but touching songs, delivering the essence of the scientific findings — linking the very detailed experimental results into basic meaning of day-to-day life.”
Music and science complement each other, she said, because a science director of environmental studies and associate professor of biology at NYU “both deal with feelings, but in a different way. Science probes them, trying to understand the underlying neural mechanisms, whereas music simply represents them and tries to create them.”
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