Famed Bay Area musician helps with brain research
From: KGO-TV San Francisco - 09/06/2013
By: Jonathan Bloom

Famed Bay Area musician Mickey Hart has long believed that music is the best
medicine. Now he's helping uncover the science to prove it.

Hart is best known for the rhythms he created with the Grateful Dead. But
lately, he's more concerned with a different kind of rhythm.

The rhythm in the brain, finding out what rhythm central sounds like," Hart
said. "It's the master clock. It makes everything go."

In his years on the road, hart says he always felt music had a special power
over the brain to heal and awaken it.

One day, that hunch became a certainty.

"My grandmother, who had Alzheimer's, advanced Alzheimer's, and she couldn't
speak, she hadn't spoken in over a year, I played a drum for her, and she
spoke my name," Hart said. "She started to become connected again -- to
become verbal."

The improvement lasted only a moment, but Hart says it changed his direction
in life forever.

Now Hart is participating in an experiment where he wears an EEG cap and each
of the electrodes are help detect the very subtle signals that have rhythmic
activity being generated by the neurons in his brain.

Hart is taking this gear on tour with him so live audiences can watch his
neurons pulse as he plays the drums.

Read the entire article and view a video (2:58) at:
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/assignment_7&id=9239644

Links:
Adam Gazzaley
http://gazzaleylab.ucsf.edu/lab-director.html

Gazzaley Lab
http://gazzaleylab.ucsf.edu/page74.html