There was a song I couldn’t help singing along to - here. It became stuck in my head. I asked the Stranger’s resident doctor and Dear Science columnist, Jonathan “the Glob” Golob if there was a brain cleanse I could do to get the song out of my head.

Dr. Golob said:

Music does something plain old weird to the brain. I’d have to research, but take this tid-bit as a treat:

People with brain damage that destroys the speech part of the brain can still sing, including singing lyrics. There is an entire therapy based around getting people to first “converse” in song, and eventually return to speech after strokes or accidents.

I then asked him if people expend energy when they think and how that energy is measured.

Dr. Golob said:

The brain is super picky about what it’ll burn—only sugar or ketones (little short fat-like molecules made by the liver during starvation.) The brain also eats up a ton of oxygen.

Any activity in the brain locally increases the consumption of both food and oxygen in the brain. So when you hear a study using fMRI, PET scans or the like, it’s this local increase in energy consumption that we’re reading.

When someone has suffered brain damage, it’s common practice to put them in a temporary drug-induced coma. A comatose brain needs less oxygen and food and therefore has a better chance of healing.

What about seeing? Do we expend energy to see? Does it take energy for the cones and rods to fire signals through the optic nerve? I would think so. But where does that energy come from?

Ok, this is even niftier. All of the brain cells use the same energy plan: burn off sugar, fat or protein to run pumps. One pump shoves Sodium ions out of the cell, and potassium ions in. Another shoves calcium out of the cell. So, when the cell wants to do something, like spread a signal, it simply opens up a door and lets calcium or sodium in (or potassium out, or both). The doors shut and the energy-burning pumps clean everything up for the next round.

In vision, a little packet of light energy hits a protein inside of the rod or cone cell, causing the protein to change shape. Eventually this shape change causes some of the doors to close, the sodium and calcium levels drop inside of the cell, and it releases a small amount of chemical signal. The chemical signal turns on the next cell. And so on.

Music is unusual because so much of the brain gets activated. Instead of just a few splotches, almost the whole brain lights up with these energy-use-detecting tests.

I fucking love biology!