Somewhere, I think, Yiren Ren is studying, focused on her research that demonstrates how music impacts learning and memory. Possibly, she’s listening to Norah Jones, or another musician she’s comfortable with. Because that’s how it works: The music we know and might love, music that feels predictable or even safe — that music can help us study and learn. Meanwhile, Ren has also discovered, other kinds of music can influence our emotions and reshape old memories.

Ren, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology, explores these concepts as the lead author of two new research papers in the journals PLOS Oneand Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience (CABN).

“These studies are connected because they both explore innovative applications of music in memory modulation, offering insights for both every day and clinical use,” says Ren.

But the collective research explores music’s impacts in very different ways, explains Ren’s faculty advisor and co-author of the study, Thackery Brown.

“One paper looks at how music changes the quality of your memory when you’re first forming it — it’s about learning,” says Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist who runs the MAP (Memory, Affect, and Planning) Lab at Tech. “But the other study focuses on memories we already have and asks if we can change the emotions attached to them using music.”

Making Moods With Music

When we watch a movie with a robust score — music created to induce emotions — what we’re hearing guides us exactly where the composer wants us to go. In their CABN study, Ren, Brown, and their collaborators from the University of Colorado (including former Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Grace Leslie) report that this kind of “mood music” can also be powerful enough to change how we remember our past.

Their study included 44 Georgia Tech students who listened to film soundtracks while recalling a difficult memory. Ren is quick to point out that this was not a clinical trial, so these participants were not identified as people suffering from mood disorders: “We wanted to start off with a random group of people and see if music has the power to modulate the emotional level of their memories.”

Turns out, it does. The participants listened to movie soundtracks and incorporated new emotions into their memories that matched the mood of the music. And the effect was lasting. A day later, when the participants recalled these same memories — but without musical accompaniment — their emotional tone still matched the tone of the music played the day before.

The researchers could watch all this happening with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). They could see the altered brain activity in the study participants, the increased connectivity between the amygdala, where emotions are processed, and other areas of the brain associated with memory and integrating information.

“This sheds light on the malleability of memory in response to music, and the powerful role music can play in altering our existing memories,” says Ren.

Ren is herself a multi-instrumentalist who originally planned on being a professional musician. As an undergraduate at Boston University, she pursued a dual major in film production and sound design, and psychology.

She found a way to combine her interests in music and neuroscience and is interested in how music therapy can be designed to help people with mood disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression, “particularly in cases where someone might overexaggerate the negative components of a memory,” Ren says.

There is no time machine that will allow us to go back and insert happy music into the mix while a bad event is happening and a memory is being formed, “but we can retrieve old memories while listening to affective music,” says Brown. “And perhaps we can help people shift their feelings and reshape the emotional tone attached to certain memories.”

Embracing the Familiar

The second study asks a couple of old questions: Should we listen to music while we work or study? And if so, are there more beneficial types of music than others? The answer to both questions might lie, at least partially, within the expansive parameters of personal taste. But even so, there are limits.

Think back to my description of “Cantaloupe Island” at the beginning of this story and how a familiar old jazz standard helped keep this writer’s brain and fingers moving. In the same way, Norah Jones helps Ren when she’s working on new research around music and memory. But if, for some reason, I wanted to test my concentration, I’d play a different kind of jazz, maybe 1950s bebop with its frenetic pace and off-center tone, or possibly a chorus of screeching cats. Same effect. It would demand my attention, and no work would get done.

For this study, Ren combined her gifts as a musician and composer with her research interests in examining whether music can improve — or impair — our ability to learn or remember new information. “We wanted to probe music’s potential as a mnemonic device that helps us remember information more easily,” she says. (An example of a mnemonic device is “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” which stands for E-G-B-D-F and helps new piano players learn the order of notes on a keyboard.)

This study’s 48 participants were asked to learn sequences of abstract shapes while listening to different types of music. Ren played a piece of music, in a traditional or familiar pattern of tone, rhythm, and melody. She then played the exact same set of notes, but out of order, giving the piece an atonal structure.

When they listened to familiar, predictable music, participants learned and remembered the sequences of shapes quicker as their brains created a structured framework, or scaffold, for the new information. Meanwhile, music that was familiar but irregular (think of this writer and the bebop example) made it harder for participants to learn.

“Depending its familiarity and structure, music can help or hinder our memory,” says Ren, who wants to deepen her focus on the neural mechanisms through which music influences human behavior.

She plans to finish her Ph.D. studies this December and is seeking postdoctoral research positions that will allow her to continue the work she’s started at Georgia Tech. Building on that, Ren wants to develop music-based therapies for conditions like depression or PTSD, while also exploring new rehabilitation strategies for aging populations and individuals with dementia.

“These early studies reveal that music can both help and hinder our memory, depending on its familiarity and structure,” Ren says. “I’m excited to bring together my lifelong love of music with my interest in human memory. Because I think the next phase of my research could provide valuable evidence to support the development of music-based interventions for mental health and cognitive function.”

The study also identified a second community of cells that drives the older brain down a different path that does not lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our study highlights that Alzheimer’s is a disease of many cells and their interactions, not just a single type of dysfunctional cell,” says Columbia neurologist Philip De Jager, who led the study with Vilas Menon, assistant professor of neurological sciences at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Naomi Habib of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“We may need to modify cellular communities to preserve cognitive function, and our study reveals points along the sequence of events leading to Alzheimer’s where we may be able to intervene.”

Crunching data from 1.6 million brain cells

The study was a technical marvel, cleverly combining new molecular technologies, machine-learning techniques, and a large collection of brains donated by aging adults.

Though previous studies of brain samples from Alzheimer’s patients have provided insights into molecules involved in the disease, they have not revealed many details about where in the long sequence of events leading to Alzheimer’s those genes play a role and which cells are involved at each step of the process.

“Past studies have analyzed brain samples as a whole and they lose all cellular detail,” De Jager says. “We now have tools to look at the brain in finer resolution, at the level of individual cells. When we couple this with detailed information on the cognitive state of brain donors before death, we can reconstruct trajectories of brain aging from the earliest stages of the disease.”

The new analysis required over 400 brains, which were provided by the Religious Orders Study and the Memory & Aging Project based at Rush University in Chicago.

Within each brain, the researchers collected several thousand cells from a brain region impacted by Alzheimer’s and aging. Every cell was then run through a process — single-cell RNA sequencing — that gave a readout of the cell’s activity and which of its genes were active.

Data from all 1.6 million cells were then analyzed by algorithms and machine-learning techniques developed by Menon and Habib to identify the types of cells present in the sample and their interactions with other cells.

“These methods allowed us to gain new insights into potential sequences of molecular events that result in altered brain function and cognitive impairment,” Menon says. “This was only possible thanks to the large number of brain donors and cells the team was fortunate enough to generate data from.”

Aging vs. Alzheimer’s

Because the brains came from people at different points in the disease process, the researchers were able to solve a major challenge in Alzheimer’s research: identifying the sequence of changes in cells involved in Alzheimer’s and distinguishing these changes from those associated with normal brain aging.

“We propose that two different types of microglial cells — the immune cells of the brain — begin the process of amyloid and tau accumulation that define Alzheimer’s disease,” De Jager says.

Then after the pathology has accumulated, different cells called astrocytes play a key role in altering electrical connectivity in the brain that leads to cognitive impairment. The cells communicate with each other and bring in additional cell types that lead to a profound disruption in the way the human brain functions.

“These are exciting new insights that can guide innovative therapeutic development for Alzheimer’s and brain aging,” De Jager says.

“By understanding how individual cells contribute to the different stages of the disease, we will know the best approach with which to reduce the activity of the pathogenic cellular communities in each individual, returning brain cells to their healthy state,” De Jager says.

Their observations, drawn from a meta-analysis of 89 studies published between January 2013 and January 2024, were published in JAMA Aug. 28.

“The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 2019 was awarded for the discovery of how mammalian cells sense oxygen,” said Kim, the Rush S. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Medicine at UNC School of Medicine and co-leader of the UNC Lineberger Cancer Genetics Research Program. “One of the key components of this oxygen sensing pathway is the von Hippel-Lindau tumor suppressor gene, which is mutated in approximately 90% of kidney cancers. This deep understanding of kidney cancer biology has led to several important therapeutic advances in recent years.”

Kim trained as a post-doc with William G. Kaelin, Jr., MD, who was jointly awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for demonstrating how the von Hippel-Lindau gene influences cellular responses to changing oxygen levels.

The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 81,500 people will be diagnosed with kidney cancer in the United States this year, and the disease will cause 14,300 deaths. While the incidence of kidney cancer has been increasing by approximately 1.5% annually in recent years, deaths have decreased by about 2% each year from 2016 to 2020.

This decline in deaths is largely due to improved treatments and early detection. “The majority of kidney cancer cases are now detected incidentally, often before symptoms appear,” said Kim. He noted that the widespread use of abdominal imaging for unrelated issues has led to the incidental diagnosis of kidney cancer. “More cases are being identified in earlier stages when the cancer is typically more responsive to treatment.”

Cigarette smoking and being overweight are major risk factors for kidney cancer and are linked to nearly half of the cases in the United States. Other risk factors include high blood pressure, a family history of kidney cancer, workplace exposure to certain chemicals, and hereditary conditions, such as von Hippel-Lindau disease.

Current treatment approaches include surgery to remove part or all of the kidney, ablation using targeted heat or cold to destroy the tumor, or active surveillance with imaging technologies to monitor the tumor. For cancers that have metastasized, or spread beyond the kidney, newer treatment options include immune checkpoint inhibitors, tyrosine kinase inhibitors, or a combination of the two approaches.

“Advanced, metastatic kidney cancer is highly treatable with targeted therapy, immunotherapy or a combination of these newer therapies,” said Rose, associate professor of medicine at UNC School of Medicine. “Understanding the science underlying the disease has allowed for the rational development of therapies that have positively affected many patients the past two decades.”