Science, Food & All That Jazz

It seems like these summer blogs are becoming less about psychology than they are about my travels and hobbies. Last Saturday, Sharon and I left early in the morning and headed to San Francisco for my Birthday Boy Bash weekend (July 5). She wouldn’t tell me where we were going exactly but we had to get there by 9:00 in the morning.

Day 1: July 3, 2009
When we arrived at Golden Gate Park I followed her directions and found the destination was the new Academy of Sciences Museum. Even though we got there before the doors opened, the lines were so long it took us thirty minutes to enter the building. Once inside, we stayed there until closing at 5:00. A surprise benefit was the food available in the two cafes. Usually, food in these places is overpriced and underwhelming. We forgot we were in San Francisco, the Mecca of fine food. The meals were delicious.

The California Academy of Sciences is a world-class scientific and cultural institution based in San Francisco. The Academy recently opened a new facility in Golden Gate Park, a 400,000 square foot structure that houses an aquarium, a planetarium a natural history museum and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof.

The new facility is also home to the Academy's staff of world-class scientists, an education department that provides a wide range of student and teacher services, and an extensive science library with over 20 million specimens and artifacts.

This place is a stunning science museum. The building, itself, is a wonder to behold. It is the world’s greenest museum. The roof is called a "living roof" because it is composed of plants, soil and solar panels. You can see a picture of the roof here. Visitors can visit the roof and see why it is the largest public energy efficient building in the world. The website, itself, is quite educational and entertaining.

Inside we attended an amazing planetarium show with the latest digital effects. The aquarium consists of many different nooks and crannies for seeing a large selection of marine life. There is also a natural history museum and the one place we were not able to get to – the tropical rain forest.

After closing, we left the Academy and walked across the street to the De Young Museum. Since it was Friday night there was no admission charge. It was open to the public with entertainment by members of Stellamara. They presented live music and dance from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Roma "Gypsy" trail. You can hear a sampling of there music here. At 9:00 we drove to our hotel in the financial district for a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: July 4, 2009
The Ferry Building by the Bay is an unusual building. Not only is it a ferry landing but it is also the site of one of the best Farmer’s Markets in California. The large Saturday market is found in front of, inside, and behind the building that overlooks the Bay. About ten to fifteen thousand people crowd into this place each Saturday. Being San Francisco, the food is exquisite.

We left the Ferry Building around noon and caught a bus to The Fillmore, land of jazz, to wander around the Fillmore Jazz Festival. It stretched up and down Fillmore Street for about seven long blocks and touts itself as the Largest Free Jazz Festival on the West Coast. We listened to Sam Reider, a local twenty-something who is making his musical mark in the New York jazz scene. Later in the day we listened to another local musician, Bobbie Webb and his Smooth Blues Band. Bobbie is a local legend. Although he has played with every great Blues musician in the world, he was never a full-time musician until recently. He realized early that he needed to take care of his wife and eight children which would have been difficult as a musician. He became a mechanic by day and a musician on weekends and during vacations. Now that he is retired and has a pension and social security he has devoted himself to playing non-stop.

In the late afternoon we drifted into Yoshi’s, one of the premium jazz locations in the Bay Area. We got good seats and were entertained by a Latin jazz group. Around dinner time we went to the Jazz Club (another jazz room in Yoshi’s) for a jam session. We were lucky to get one of the last tables. We had missed Marcus Shelby on the street but caught him at a jam session in Yoshi’s Jazz Club. He had just come back from Jazz Camp West. Marcus brought four people with him from the jazz camp and they improvised for an hour and a half. BTW, Yoshi’s has great ribs.

Around 8:30, as it was getting dark, we got on another bus and headed to Pier 39 to see the fireworks over the Bay. We thought it started at 9:00 but it didn’t get going until 9:30. Even so, there were a lot of people. Everyone had taken all the places for sitting so we, and hundreds of others, had to stand. It was a beautiful night and everyone was friendly and in a good mood. As we waited for the light and noise to begin, we watched about half a dozen cruise ships take their place out in the Bay for the paying customers on board. Along the waterfront, there were four different locations where the fireworks were being set off. We could just barely see another location at Pier 27 and noticed that their fireworks were perfectly synchronized with the fireworks we were watching.

It was a spectacular show and when it was over, we walked to Fisherman’s Wharf and had a snack. From there we walked a few more blocks and caught a free bus (have I mentioned that all the entertainment during this day was free — even the music at Yoshi’s?). The city provided free bus service back to the Ferry Building. From there we walked the mile or so back to our hotel.

Day 3: July 5, 2009
We were planning to get up early, drive to Muir Woods on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and do some hiking. Instead, we slept in and just goofed off for a time. At 10:00 we walked about a mile to the new Contemporary Jewish Museum. Quite a place! Although founded in 1984 it took over a historical landmark, the Jessie Street Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Power Substation. They hired the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind to design their new home. The architecture is full of contrasts: historic and contemporary; subtle and boisterous. The blue cube in the picture on the right looks like it is falling down but is actually a part of the museum’s external structure. The inside is open and airy and is full of surprising angles. One of the exhibits we enjoyed highlighted the work of Marc Chagall and his work with the Russian Jewish Theater in the first half of the twentieth century. Other exhibits included "Being Jewish": A Bay Area Portrait, Jews on Vinyl, and Susan Hiller: The J Street Project. Fascinating.

It was finally time to head back to Sacramento except we took a side trip to the Stern Grove Festival. This is an annual summer event held in a beautiful setting among trees and hills. Roberta Flack appeared here in June. The San Francisco Ballet will be performing in August. We were privileged to listen to the San Francisco Symphony with an exciting and very young conductor James Gaffigan.

Prior to the symphony we were surprised with a half hour of jazz by the Inouye Jazz ensemble. The leader is the principal trumpet player of the SFS. The bass player is the principal bassist of SFS and the drummer is also a member of the SFS. They had added a non-SFS member, Jeff Massanari, to play guitar. Jeff is one of the most in-demand guitarists in San Francisco.

It was engaging to listen to musicians who are so talented they can be stars in both classical and jazz music. It reminds me of the young Andre Previn who is a virtuoso jazz pianist and a top-ranked orchestra conductor.

And then we had to go home.

Psychology and the Brain

Several of you have written to me and asked for some articles on neuroscience. Well, actually you didn't used that word but you said you were interested in topics on the brain and memory. Although I am not trained as a neuropsychologist, I'm fascinated by the topic. It is also one of the hottest fields in psychology today.

Psychologists studying the brain are some of the most original thinkers in the science of human behavior. The human brain is the most complicated organ in our body. Even though computers have become better at chess than the greatest human players, some of the tasks human children taken for granted and do quite simply are beyond the skill of the most powerful computers.

In addition to what psychologists discover about the brain, I am amazed and have profound admiration for psychologists who find out how the brain works. The "how" in science is called "experimental design." The tenets of designing a good experiment are quite simple and used by all competent scientists in all fields of inquiry.

Designing a good psychology experiment includes comparing the subjects of the experiment with a control group, making certain that the subjects are randomly chosen and using what is referred to as the gold standard, the "double blind" study. This means that neither the subjects nor the experimenters really know who is doing what until the study is finished. Different procedures and the subjects are coded in order to eliminate what is called "experimenter bias." This is the basic outline of a research design; the details are much more complex.

Often when I hear about some research, I often wonder how they do it? For example a psychologist, Dr. Alexandra Lamont in the United Kingdom, determined that 1-yr old babies preferred music that they heard in the womb a year before they were born. Now, you might ask yourself the same question I did. How do we know if a 1-year old prefers one thing to another. It certainly would not do to ask the infant, "which music do you prefer?"

A group of pregnant women were selected to participate in this study. Each mother played a certain kind of music repeatedly during the final three months of gestation. (The auditory system of the fetus is fully functioning about this time). One group of mothers played classical music, another group played Top 40, the third group world played reggae, while the fourth group of mothers played world beat. Each group of unborn babies heard their music over and over.

After birth, the mothers were not allowed to play these songs to their children for one year. At the end of this year the experiment was begun. Dr. Lamont played two pieces of music to each of these four groups of children. Each group of children heard the music that had been repetitively played a year earlier plus other music that matched the womb music in tempo and style. In other words, Dr. Lamont wondered if the children would prefer the music their mothers played instead of something kind of like it.

Here is where it becomes easy to admire the ingenuity of scientists. Before reading on, stop and think for a few minutes how you would have figured out which type of music the child preferred. Did the first group like the classical music better than something sort of like classical music? Were the preferences similar in the other three groups?

Okay, here is what she did. Each infant sat on the mother's lap with two speakers on either side of the child. One speaker would play the music from a year ago, the other speaker would play the similar music. But this still leaves the question open – how would this help to discover which music the babies preferred.

No music came from either speaker until the baby turned its head in the direction of the speaker. Babies are curious and wiggly. When the baby turned left, the left speaker came on; when the baby turned to the right, the right speaker played its music. Eventually, the baby's brain realized that it could turn different music on or off by turning in a specific direction. What Dr. Lamont found is that preference was determined by how much time the baby spent facing in one direction. How clever.

Now, Dr. Lamont didn't invent this procedure. It was already well known by other researchers who studied infant behavior and is called the "infant head turning procedure" (catchy name). The study found that all the infants looked longer at the music that was coming from the speaker that played the music they heard prior to birth.

Dr. Lamont, being the excellent researcher that she was, used a control group of children. These children had not had the same music played to them prenatally. The same experiment was done with them, but it is was found the babies had no preference for any particular style of music.

As a postscript, some of you may be familiar with what is called the "Mozart Effect." When the media got a hold of this study they concluded that babies who listened to Mozart would become smarter than if they did not listen to it. Cottage industries sprang up selling and promoting CDs and programs for "making kids smarter."

Unfortunately, Dr. Lamont's study never came to this conclusion and further studies showed that listening to Mozart – or any other music – did not increase intelligence. Unsurprisingly, the Mozart myth lingers to this day for unsuspecting parents.