IAP Independent Activities Period
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IAP 2012 Activities by Sponsor

Health Sciences & Technology

A Crash Course in the Neuropsychology of Music
Peter Cariani
Enrollment limited: first come, first served
Limited to 60 participants.
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)

These two lectures provide an overview of the current state of the neuropsychology of music

Part I: What We Hear - Structural Aspects of Music
Part II: The Neural Bases for Music's Psychological Functions.
Contact: Joseph R Stein, E25-518, 452-4091, jrstein@mit.edu

What We Hear - Structural Aspects of Music
Peter Cariani
In the first lecture we will introduce basic questions, such as what is music? What are the many psychological and social functions that music fulfills? We will then take a look at the basic auditory qualities that music utilizes: loudness, pitch, timbre, consonance, harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, the time sense. Basic Gestaltist mechanisms group together sounds with harmonic structure, sonic events having similar qualities, and repeating sequences of events (chunks). We will survey the respective uses of these auditory qualities, groupings, and patterns in music and examine some of the auditory and general brain codes and computations that may subserve them.
Wed Jan 11, 07:30-09:30pm, 32-124

Part II: The Neural Bases for Music's Psychological Functions
Peter Cariani
In this lecture, we look at the neural bases for music's psychological functions. Sequences of sonic contrasts create expectancies, violations & reconfirmations that are experienced as tensions/relaxations. Music engages brain circuits associated with emotion, pleasure, temporal prediction/reward, and semantic/syntactic processing. Developmental studies suggest newborns have basic music percepts (pitch, melody, harmony, rhythm) not acquired through learning.

However, music has hard-to-explain, diverse effects: cognitive interest; emotion/mood/arousal/motivation control; dancing/exercise/motoric engagement; meditation/trance/sleep; analgesia; mnemonics/nostalgia. Instead, music may speak the "language of the brain" by structurally coupling to brain circuits, imposing repeating temporal patterns not unlike those of normal bodily & mental activities. Temporal patterns may be essential to central neural codes. Like other artificial means of inducing pleasure, taking direct structural control of our brains becomes its own reward.
Wed Jan 18, 07:30-09:30pm, 32-124

Can We Innovate Our Way Out of the Healthcare Crisis?
Steven E. Locke, M.D. Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Technology (HST)
Wed Jan 11, 12-01:30pm, E25-401, Please RSVP by 1/10/11

No limit but advance sign up required (see contact below)
Signup by: 10-Jan-2012
Single session event

You bet! 
Innovation in healthcare to reduce cost while improving quality has led to development of technologies for patient engagement, electronic health records, mobile health, and other innovative technologies being part of the “medical home.” For the intended outcomes, we need innovation leaders who can think and act like entrepreneurs. The faculty of the HST.921 course, Enabling Technology Innovation in Healthcare and the Life Sciences, will present and discuss all aspects of the course -- including the mix of lectures by world leaders in medical informatics, skills-based tutorial sessions and faculty-mentored work on industry-sponsored projects. 

We will conduct an experiential workshop in which student teams will collaborate in the impromptu design of a “device,” and we will test it and award a prize to the winning team. Lunch will be provided.
Web: http://www.hst921.org/home/
Contact: Joseph Stein, E25-518, (617) 452-4091, jrstein@mit.edu

Medical Imaging: Seeing What Makes You Sick
Randy Gollub HST/HMS/MGH
Mon-Tue, Jan 9-10, 17, 23-24, 30, 12:30-02:00pm, 36-462 (Allen Room)

Enrollment limited: first come, first served
Limited to 30 participants.
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)

Imaging technologies (MRI, PET, CT, ultrasound, optical) are the cornerstones of medical practice. We will explore how they make physical properties of human tissues visible, highlighting current capabilities, limitations and the future potential of improvements to the technology. We will delve deeply into a physiological process such as angiogenesis and show how it is disrupted by disease focusing on how visualization through different imaging modalities has both advanced our understanding of the biology and contributed to improvements in healthcare. Sessions will focus on a specific example of how one imaging modality is used in the treatment of a cancer, or a neuropsychiatric, pulmonary or cardiovascular disorder. Each session will be led by a unique trio of experienced faculty members (an HMS affiliated clinical translational investigator using an imaging modality in their work, a hosting/collaborating MIT professor who has contributed to the development of that technology and a discussant who has sufficient knowledge and interest in the topic to generate a lively discussion.

Participants are encouraged to attend the 1/09 session to gain more from the activity.

Presenters include: Randy Gollub, Bruce Rosen, Georges El Fakhri, Steve Hyman, Jacob Hooker, Jeff Yap, Collin Stultz, Jose Venegas, Samuel Patz, David Sosnovik, Ron Blankstein, and more.
Web: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/medicalimaging/
Contact: Joseph R Stein, E25-518, (617) 452-4091, jrstein@mit.edu

Mobile Health in Developing Countries: Sana and OpenMRS
Eric Winkler
Sun-Sat, Jan 26, 28-3, 10am-12:00pm, 56-180

No limit but advance sign up required (see contact below)
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)
Prereq: None

The interactive sessions will focus on the Sana Android client and our extensions to OpenMRS, a widely used open source medical records system. Sana is currently looking to expand and refine the available features we provide in both of areas.
Web: http://sana.mit.edu/wiki/index.php?title=2012_IAP/Winter_Session
Contact: Eric Winkler, winkler.em@gmail.com
Cosponsor: SANA


MIT  
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Last update: 7 Sept. 2011