0 CommentsOn February 29th, Staff Writer Erika Avallone attended an immersive experience and lecture featuring Ursula Kwong-Brown, researcher, composer, and media artist, and Professor Darcy Kelley, seeking to uncover the similarities between amphibian and human cognition.
On Thursday evening, February 29th, Columbia’s Center for Science and Society conducted ‘The Frog in the Forest: 60 Minutes of Sound & Art To Calm Your Brain,’ in association with the Zuckerman Institute. The event was a combination of lecture and participatory techniques and explored how various soundscapes trigger neurological processes. Darcy Kelley, Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia, led the audience on a tour of the human brain, explaining how its cognition relates to that of frogs. Professor Kelley acted as a mentor to Ursula Kwong-Brown, the event’s main panelist.
Kwong-Brown is a composer and media artist who began this amphibiously rooted project in her undergraduate research at Columbia. After studying African clod frogs, and deciphering their unfamiliar underwater songs, Kwong-Brown sought to use this communication style to understand the neural circuits that underlie songs, mating calls, and rival warnings.
Two summers ago, Kwong-Brown and Kelley developed her original amphibious research into a study on relaxation exercises. At the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the two delved into the cognitive consequences of selective sound baths; their investigative pursuit was accompanied by Danny Erdberg, a sound artist who was also present at the panel.
From the beginning of the presentation, the audience was given headphones to block out external distractions and focus on the sound cues. In this superficial environment, the panelists attempted to illustrate the fragility of relaxation and strength through various auditory signals. As ocean sounds swelled through the headphones, galactic colors and shapes projected on the screen. A voice (which I later realized was Erdberg’s) broke through the white noise and called attention to breathing patterns.
Operating a second soundboard, Kwong-Brown signaled rhythmic repetitive chimes, indicating that the audience should inhale nasally. Danny’s voice encouraged us to let thoughts flow in and out, completely unfiltered, but not to let those anxieties deter the breathing practice. As we continued this breathing ritual, Professor Kelley led an explanatory presentation on cognitive signals, especially how human and frog neural pathways overlap.
Human and frog hippocampus structures, which store memories and determine stress responses, are uncannily similar; so are human and frog amygdalas, which perceive and assess fear and anxiety. By targeting these structures in frogs to understand why they may react differently to various circumstances, Kwong-Brown and Kelley hoped to shed light on human experiences with stress and alarm.
For example, the presentation depicted Times Square, a setting that the majority of the audience associated with high unhealthy stress. While Times Square may be a very familiar manifestation of stress, Kwong-Brown explained that the COVID pandemic has changed what is perceived as “normal” stress. To illustrate the malleability of stress, Kwong-Brown described how she spent the thick of the pandemic in Midtown Manhattan, observing the oddly empty Penn Station escalators and the barrenness of an industrial city. She recalled feeling “like a doll in some kind of colossal doll house.” Instead of experiencing stress due to overcrowdedness and a fast-paced lifestyle, she was anxious over a lack of movement and an absence of purpose. Kwong-Brown’s reflection revealed that the cognitive processes for stress are often reliant on the familiarity of an environment; how can contradictory settings elicit similar recognitions of stress?
To further explore this connection between social settings and stress reactors, the panel played the sound of a baby crying. The cries activate the human amygdala in both mothers and fathers and so the baby’s crying exacerbates both their own stress and the stress of those around them. After listening to the baby’s cries, the audience was instructed to focus on their own nasal breathing, then place one hand on a relaxed stomach, recognizing the physical release of tension. This physical act counters experienced emotional stress, and attempts to prevent an overwhelming sense of anxiety.
As stress accumulates, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stress is caused by an external stimulus that triggers the release of cortisol and hyper-cortisol, which changes the nucleic functioning of bodily cells. However, once a person is aware that they are reacting to stress, they become more attuned to other stressful stimuli, multiplying the cognitive responses from a singular reactor.
To bring the audience’s breathing back to a place of stability, and de-escalate awareness of our own stress, Kwong-Brown utilized the sensory serenity of a lemon. She instructed attendees to imagine how we would react to picking up and tasting a lemon wedge, and then instructed us to scan the realism of our physical states. Again, chimes signaled a strategic breathing motion; at the end of each inhale, we initiated a second shorter inhale, before completely breathing out.
Next, we were instructed to hum along with music (still being played through headphones), and then transition to an ‘’ooo” sound, gently letting sounds emerge at any pitch. The headphones eliminated feelings of self-consciousness, and so the relaxation experience was as individual and authentic as it could possibly be. Kwong-Brown and Kelley explained that this “ooo” exercise related to their research concerning the songs of South African frogs.
After studying and trying to replicate the songs of male frogs, they realized that each sound is actually an interval of two frequencies (to be even more specific, that interval is a perfect fourth). When a male frog sings this interval, and a female frog returns the song, they engage in a sonic duet, creating the mating call. Even more interestingly, when a male frog’s cognitive connectivity is blocked, and he cannot correctly transcribe the female’s response, he will interpret the sound as one from a male rival. In both situations, the male frog will be on cognitive high alert, but the various frequencies of received sounds translate to different settings. Just like in humans, frogs use cognitive processes (in the hippocampus and amygdala) to translate soundscapes into emotional states.
The presentation concluded with the importance of nasal breathing, specifically the practiced double inhale, as a method of recognizing and managing stress. While stress triggers may be out of our control, consciously recognizing the connection between our environments and accumulated stress is key to de-escalating our nervous systems. Just as in frogs, human cognitive pathways are extremely vulnerable to nearby soundscapes, and by deciphering these amphibious inclinations, we can better prepare for our changing environments.
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