When Poulsen left school, she studied sonology at Griffith University’s Queensland Conservatorium and then went off touring and making music for 20 years. That goes all the way up to humans where we have to be able to discriminate between different sounds.” For a fish, that might be to know a predator is approaching, or if there’s something hitting the water. Poulsen says all animals need to be able to understand the information coming in to them through sound. Is this something that’s fundamental to animals? That raises some big philosophical questions in my mind.” “It’s not something that’s in their environment. “So why would fish be happy hearing music?” asks Poulsen. She composed her own piece of dance music and that did seem to light things up.īecause zebrafish are a common subject for experiments, another group of researchers have claimed playing them a couple of hours of Vivaldi twice a day for 15 days made them calmer and helped part of their immune system. Out of professional and scientific curiosity – and also presumably just because she could – Poulsen played music to the fish. This is, happily, where MC Hammer comes in. The fish can tell the difference between complex and different sounds.” “When you look at the neurons that light up at each sound, they’re unique. Poulsen also tried more complex sounds, like white noise and “frequency sweeps”, which she describes as “like the sound when Wile E Coyote falls off a cliff” in the Road Runner cartoons. “It told us their hearing range was broader than we thought it was before,” she says. The analysis for the study doesn’t look at how the fish larvae react during Hammer time, but how their brain cells react to more simple sounds. The results of Poulsen’s sound experiments have been published in the journal Current Biology. Photograph: Luke Davidsīut between DJ gigs, and 20 years after leaving university for a music career, she is now studying neuroscience at Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.Īnd part of this involves gently securing baby zebrafish inside a chamber and then playing them sounds while scanning their brains with a laser and looking at what happens through a microscope. Researcher Rebecca Poulsen in her DJ life.
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