In a dimly lit laboratory, three students dressed in white coats attach electrodes to Psychology Lecturer Paul Mazeroff’s forehead. The reluctant lab rat is about to have his brain waves read.

“I just gave them the keys to the lab and told them to have fun,” says Mazeroff. “That’s the kind of thing you can do here, come in anytime and do experiments.”

For the independent study course, “Emotional Responses to Music,” Elizabeth Meade ’07, Rachel Hurley ’07 and Kristin O’Toole ’09 perform EEG’s on test subjects in order to find out what happens inside their brains as they learn music. They are trying to uncover the differences between learning music by repeating a tune versus by reading notes.

“We’re seeing the wave of activity in the different hemispheres,” says O’Toole.

As soft music that sounds like a bubbling creek plays in the lab, red and green jagged lines scroll across the computer screen. From the intensity of the spikes, the students can read the wave of activity in Mazeroff’s right- and left-brain hemispheres. The “alpha” waves appear farther apart when a person is relaxed. “Beta” waves will appear short and condensed if there is a lot of activity in the brain.

“We discovered a lot of weird things,” says Mazeroff. “Trained musicians’ brains aren’t organized the same way as non-musicians’ brains. There is an idea that music training takes away from emotional expression because it’s harder to be passionate about something that you are intellectual about.”

“The more people learn about the brain, the more they realize it’s all connected,” adds Music Professor Margaret Boudreaux, who leads the independent study with Mazeroff.

The lab is a sequel to bi-yearly course “Music and the Brain,” which began in 2004 when Mazeroff and Boudreaux collaborated in order to uncover why music makes a person feel happy or sad. Teri Hamer ’06, a self-designed Neuroscience major, helped develop and write the lab manual for the course when she was a freshman. At the Eastern Psychological Association earlier this month, she presented research about how happy and sad tunes affect a person's mood.

For the lab trio, having the freedom to experiment anytime encourages more study. Mead is planning to research the emotional buildup in songs that leads to the peak she calls “the tingle.” Hurley is brainstorming new tests.

“It’s fun to play with this stuff,” she says. “You’re always coming up with new ideas for experiments and wondering what your brain looks like doing different things.”