Fredrik Ullén is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt and a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet
Major news from us at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics is that a new imaging center, CoBIC, has been inaugurated in Frankfurt this summer. A new Terra.X 7 Tesla MR scanner from Siemens will be installed in June. This provides fantastic opportunities for structural and functional studies of the human brain with high resolution. Additionally, CoBIC has two 3T scanners and a MEG scanner. The center is a collaborative project between our Max Planck Institute, Goethe University, and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience and will play a significant role in making the Frankfurt area an attractive international hub for cognitive neuroscience and studies of the human brain. Furthermore, exciting opportunities for new collaborations in advanced imaging with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig are emerging, as they are also acquiring new MR scanners. From our side, we are of course looking forward to studying questions about the musical brain, how the brain learns and performs new skills, and creativity with state-of-the-art techniques.
In addition to this, we have exciting and extensive collaborations with the Karolinska Institutet and the Swedish Twin Registry. We completed a new large data collection from the Twin Registry's Stage cohort last year. It will enable us to study a range of new questions regarding gene-environment interactions in expertise and creativity, but also allows us to continue delving into issues regarding the relationships between cultural engagement, well-being, and health. Our team in Stockholm is also fully engaged this year in conducting a large, longitudinal study where we follow the learning of new musical skills and analyze the brain mechanisms for this in a group of twins.
Publications
Among interesting publications from the recent months, these two could perhaps be highlighted:
Experiencing Flow: A Natural Shield Against Mental and Cardiovascular Disease?
In this study, recently published in Translational Psychiatry, by linking twin data on flow experiences in everyday life to diagnoses from the patient registry, strong evidence is found suggesting that flow may have positive, causal effects on mental health
Read more about this study here
Music and Genomes: Beethoven’s Genes Put to the Test
In this study published in Current Biology, we capitalized on the fact that Beethoven's DNA has recently been analyzed using preserved hair strands by a group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Still, very little has been done regarding genome-wide association studies on musical variables. However, we recently participated in the first such study. A very simple musical phenotype was used, which was available, namely self-reported rhythmic ability, specifically whether the person believed they could keep the beat to music or not. Here, we simply decided to calculate Beethoven's polygenic score for this variable, which somewhat surprisingly turned out to be entirely unremarkable. Of course, this does not mean that Beethoven was unmusical or that genes lack importance for musicality and creative talent. Rather, the results highlight how tricky it can be to predict individual-level traits with the genetic tools we currently have access to.