Music can be so omnipresent in daily life – blasting out of tinny Bluetooth speakers at the beach, wafting through the aisles at the grocery store, filling the background of an ad on TV – that many of us give it little thought. But for neuroscientist Ed Large, director of the Music Dynamics Laboratory at UConn, music and thought are inseparable.

In November, Large was recognized at the Music Has Power Symposium in New York City, organized by The Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF), for his work in understanding the power of music to boost brain function. The symposium, which brought together scientists and musicians alike, was the perfect forum for Large, who went from playing bluegrass to being recognized for his groundbreaking work regarding the ability of musical rhythms to synchronize and train brain rhythms.

Large’s primary contribution to the field of music cognition is neural synchronization. The neuroscientist – who is also a professor in the departments of Psychological Science and Physics – derived equations that describe how the brain works when it synchronizes to rhythms, and soon enough, experiments began to support his hypotheses.

In one of those experiments, Large and Psyche Loui, a professor at Northeastern University, based their hypotheses in part on research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that directly stimulated the hippocampus of mice with genetically engineered Alzheimer’s disease. Loui asked whether adding light to Large’s models of synchronization to musical rhythms could create an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s. After four years and $4.5 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), their work has improved memory in patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease.  

The type of music that best activates the brain is music that people pick themselves, Large says. Even compared to music that patients are very familiar with, Large observes, “If they chose the music themselves, it actives certain areas of the brain, more than any other kind of music.”

Large discovered his passion for the scientific field of music cognition while in graduate school. Large started his undergraduate studies as a math major, but, choosing to follow his dream of being a professional musician, switched to studying classical guitar performance. After earning his degree from Southern Methodist University and performing for a few years, he went to graduate school at Ohio State University to study artificial intelligence and cognitive science. While there, he learned about the field of music cognition and immediately knew it was what he was supposed to be doing.

“I wasn’t meant to be a performer; I was born to do this,” Large says.  

The IMNF, which recognized Large’s work in New York this year, was founded by Concetta (Connie) Tomaino, a music therapist, and Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and best-selling author. Large became involved with the IMNF while he was teaching in Florida, and Tomaino asked if he would join their Scientific Advisory Board. Although hesitant at first, he went to New York to learn about the work she had been doing.

Tomaino had been treating patients with debilitating brain damage, causing aphasia, a disorder that makes it difficult to speak, read, and understand language. Large observed two main types of patients: older adults who had strokes, and younger adults who had survived gunshot wounds to the head. And it was a drum circle among these patients that was a turning point in Large’s thinking about music therapy. An atmosphere of depression and negativity, he recalls, was replaced by a sense of happiness and satisfaction following vigorous participation in the 30-minute drum circle.

“If that is all music therapy does for patients, that is enough,” Large says. “But it turns out, it can do a lot more.”

Next for his research is Phase 2 Clinical Trials. In these next trials, Large will expand his research by testing a greater number of Alzheimer’s patients. And Large continues to do basic research in the lab, looking at the synchronization of brain rhythms to musical rhythms. He aims to be able to target specific areas of the brain with specific frequencies of stimulation using music and possibly synchronized light. 

“If we can do this much with what we know now, there is so much more we can do,” he says.