Shape of things to comeDHS: brain music to relax first responders

In 1999 Meryl Streep starred in a fact-based movie about a New York City high-school music teacher who saved her violin-teaching program from the budget cutters by organizing a fund-raising concert at Carnegie Hall in which violinists Isaac Stern, Isaac Perelman, Joshua Bell, and others appeared to support the cause. The movie as called Music of the Heart. Soon we will probably have a movie made titled Music of the Brain. Here is why.

The Pentagon has DARPA, its intellectually restless, push-the-envelope research arm, and DHS has its Science & Technology Directorate (S&T), its own intellectually restless, push-the-envelope research unit. S&T has unveiled plans to enhance the performance of firemen and federal agents by playing them special music synthesized from their own brain waves.

“Every brain has a soundtrack,” note S&T people. “When that soundtrack is recorded and played back — to an emergency responder, or a firefighter — it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward … the influence of music on emotional well-being has emerged as a hot field of scientific study.”

Lewis Page writes that the DHS Brain Music program uses a version of the Brain Music Therapy technology provided by Purcellville, Virginia-based firm Human Bionics LLC. This works by measuring a subject’s brain signatures using an electroencephalogram and turning them into synthesized piano music — either a stress-reducing relaxation track, or an alertness-boosting one “for improved concentration and decision-making.” These tend to sound like Chopin and Mozart respectively, according to Robert Burns, brain-tunes program chief at the DHS.

“Strain comes with an emergency response job, so we are interested in finding ways to help these workers remain at the top of their game when working and get quality rest when they go off a shift,” adds Burns. “Our goal is to find new ways to help first responders perform at the highest level possible.”

The bonce-sonata kit “is derived from patented technology developed at Moscow University to use brain waves as a feedback mechanism to correct physiological conditions”, it says here. It will form part of the DHS Readiness Optimization Program, in which “nutrition, education and neurotraining” will be used to boost the operational performance of American police, firefighters and “federal agents”. The first guinea pigs, however, will be “a selected group of local area firefighters”.

The DHS has supplied an example bit of biofeedback mind-music, which you can download here.