Sting’s brain scans provide window to his musical mind

Scientists have studied the brain scans of English singer and songwriter Sting in an unusual research that provides a window into the mind of the masterful musician and recipient of 16 Grammy Awards.

The study represents an approach that could offer insights into how gifted individuals find connections between seemingly disparate thoughts or sounds, in fields ranging from arts to politics or science. Sixty-four-year-old Sting, is the former lead singer of musical band The Police. He has won 16 Grammy Awards, including one in 1982 for the hit single Don’t Stand So Close To Me.

“These state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting’s brain organises music,” said lead author Daniel Levitin from McGill University in Canada.

The research stemmed from a serendipitous encounter several years ago, researchers said.

Sting had read Levitin’s book This Is Your Brain on Music. His representatives contacted Levitin and asked if he might take a tour of the lab at McGill. Levitin agreed and asked if Sting also wanted to have his brain scanned.

Both functional and structural scans were conducted at the McGill’s Montreal Neurological Institute.

Levitin then teamed up with Scott Grafton, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, to use two novel techniques to analyse the scans. The techniques, known as multivoxel pattern analysis and representational dissimilarity analysis, showed which songs Sting found similar to one another and which ones are dissimilar — based on activation of brain regions. Astor Piazolla’s evocative tango composition Libertango and the 1960s Beatles hit Girl proved to be two of the most similar. Another such example was Sting’s Moon over Bourbon Street and Booker T. and the MG’s Green Onions, both of which are in the key of F minor, have the same tempo (132 beats per minute) and a swing rhythm, they said.