Testing ... Testing -- From the Science Lab to the Stage

It may be difficult to picture a scientist leaving the lab and picking up a guitar to head out to an open mic night at a local coffeehouse.

Conversely, it may be odd to consider a performing singer/songwriter coming home from a weekend of music and putting on her lab coat to head out to her “day job.”

Turns out, some colleagues have trouble picturing it as well.

But those are two of the sides to Ashley Juavinett. A PhD neuroscientist serving her postdoctoral fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Juavinett is also a singer/songwriter who has performed at music venues across the country, and has even released a few independent albums.

 “It’s funny, but at work, it usually takes time for me to come out to people as a musician,” Juavinett said during a recent phone conversation. “There’ll be some sort of an event, ‘Hey, I can play. I dabble.’ It’s just kind of happening now that people are starting to find out. A few months ago I started playing a few more gigs, and it was like, ‘You have this whole other side of you?’ ‘Yeah, kind of.’”

To her colleagues, Juavinett is a dedicated scientist studying the effects of multisensory stimuli on mice and how the brain processes that information. It’s a study she’s been working on since she began at CSH Laboratory more than 18 months ago.

She knew she wanted to study multisensory information, but in a more natural context than is often found in studies involving mice.

“Typically in rodent behavioral research, we train the rodents to do something and study the brain, but my approach, but it’s hard and time-consuming to train rodents,” she said. “My approach has been to try to do something that’s a little more natural to what the rodent typically does.

“The question I’m studying is, ‘How does the brain combine visual and auditory information in order to guide behavior?’ The basic idea being that every moment you have to deal with a lot of sensory information, but somehow your brain has to combine it and help you navigate the world. To do this, we’re using a mouse model, we have these recording devices that are kind of amazing that allow you to record from hundreds of neurons in the brain simultaneously, so we implant these in the mouse brain and the mouse is freely moving and running around while we expose it to different types of visual or auditory stimuli, with the basic question being, ‘What is the brain doing when we present that stimuli?’”

Using neuropixels to map the brain activity, while also observing the reactions of the mice to the various types of stimuli, help Juavinett to discern how the mice are combining and processing information.

“We want to try to study the brain in as natural as possible environment, so I’ve developed this paradigm that takes advantage of the fact that mice run away from predators that come overhead,” she said. “So we present visual predators where the predator is basically a dot that expands in size so it simulates something approaching. There’s a visual version and an auditory version and a version that has both.

“Behavior-wise, the mice respond much more vigorously to the multisensory version. So they’re integrating information, saying ‘There’s something overhead, and I should definitely run away.’ So now we’re trying to understand what the circuits in the brain are actually doing differently in that situation where the brain has to combine information.”

The question, then, becomes how can this information be used to learn about how humans would react to such stimuli?

“The overlap between mice and humans is more in the way of understanding how brain circuits work in general,” Juavinett said. “Where neurology is, it’s a tough question to think about how circuits combine information. People are trying to model circuits, model real behavior and see how a neural circuit works, how the brain works, how it goes awry with conditions like schizophrenia or autism.”

Perhaps the most relatable example of this would be in the way people react to a 3D movie. When Juavinett is out presenting her group’s findings, video/audio examples of this reaction to stimuli can often result in viewers reacting as they would to a 3D movie.

“It’s funny, when I give a talk or my adviser gives a talk, you will see people back away when they show it on screen,” she said. “But obviously we’re looking for more than just that. People do studies in infants, trying to understand, at what point do they recognize something is coming at them. People use stimuli to understand the developmental process.”

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While Juavinett may have experience working with auditory stimuli in a lab setting, she’s an expert in auditory stimuli when it comes from her soul. She’s been playing guitar and writing original music for many years; she released an EP, 20 Miles to Freedom, as an undergrad at Lafayette College, and followed it up two years later with her first full-length album, Skies Apart.

Though she mainly performs solo, she spent time as a member of The Dark Matter Turtles, a quartet of University of California San Diego medical students who, according to their Facebook page, enjoyed “moonlighting as a soulcoustapoppafunk band.”

“I never really took that leap with music,” Juavinett said. “Science is what I know and what I love. But what’s nice is that I still get to stretch my creative muscles a little bit in music and writing. As long as I have an outlet, I’m a happy person.

“My music has definitely gotten more personal in the past few years. There’s always a time in people’s lives where it’s very vulnerable to be sharing your own personal story, and there would always be certain topics I would leave out. For me, the past few years, my music and my lyrics have gotten more personal, deeper, which is great for me as an individual, because writing music is therapy.”

Juavinett also believes her interest in psychology—which plays a huge part in neuroscience—lends itself to her approach to writing music … finding ways to connect with others on a personal, emotional level.

“There’s a desire to understand the human condition in psychology as well as in music and songwriting, there’s an interest in exploring what people go through, to see what songs move people, as opposed to songs that maybe mean something to me but not anyone else. I never really wanted to study the science or psychology of music. I like having them separate so that music never feels like work.

“Pursuing music full-time had crossed my mind a few times. My approach had always been that if I ever got an opportunity in music that was so amazing, I would leave science and pursue music. But the truth is those opportunities don’t just pop up, you have to work at it and work at it and I haven’t really been working at it to make it happen. I find it very fulfilling and I really enjoy doing what I’m doing: science and research, and music on the side.”

   Juavinett has seen her musical styles evolve and grow as she has.

“I’ve been trying to different styles, I tried to move into jazz a bit, more raw folk-type things,” she said. “I’m moving away from the pure acoustic pop thing.”

While Juavinett admits she hasn’t spent too much time in the local Long Island music scene – something she’d like to remedy moving forward – she has performed at various open mics, played an acoustic set at a Fall Festival in Huntington, and plays at a monthly live music yoga class.

“That’s a super-fun and challenging new project,” she said. “It’s mostly instrumental and what I do usually includes a lot of vocals. I try to match the mood of the class, play more instrumental pieces, build up interesting textures. It’s a very different direction.”

“I’m very certain that I do want to keep writing and sharing my music, but the energy for performing ebbs and flows based on what is going on in my life. I’m actually quite an introvert, so standing up and memorizing and preparing, the whole social experience that goes into a performance, I always need time to decompress afterward.”

While there may not seem to be much of an intersect in a Venn diagram that consists of laboratory science in one set and writing and performing music in the other set, but there’s no doubt that the confidence gained and the reaction achieved from performing in front of a live audience has helped color Juavinett’s love of trying to reach people with science as well.

“I don’t feel like there’s a ton of things crossing over between science and music,” she said with a laugh. “But one way these do inform each other is the comfort of being in front of people and performing. I feel very comfortable giving a scientific talk, I generally feel very comfortable on stage and in front of people, and that comes from performing music in front of people.”

Juavinett is passionate about sharing science with as many people as possible. She has contributed articles to numerous science websites including Massive Science, where you’ll find a very relatable article about trying to find an obscure item at Home Depot without having to spend all day explaining why you need it.

“It’s funny, I think most scientists hate to write anecdotal pieces like that,” she said. “Coming from a songwriting background, we recognize the power of telling a story, so why can’t we do the same thing with science and science writing as well? Not every neuroscientist goes into Home Depot and has the experience I had, but people can relate to that mundane part of that.

“If you can show that you care about something and you can tell a story people can relate to, give it a different slant than people are used to, I think that can be way more powerful than writing an article that says, ‘Genes are made up of this…’ It’s about making a connection to people’s lives, and about stripping down notions people have about how you can present science or how you can present anything.”

Juavinett has also worked with Guerilla Science, an organization dedicated to creating entertaining and inspiring presentations and installations for cultural events in an effort to connect people with science.

“Guerilla Science will bring science into unusual spaces—music festivals, art festivals … they’ll pitch a tent, run science programs, give talks or workshops. It’s really amazing, and everybody is able to do a fun science project. I really like them, they keep sparking curiosity and interest with people. It’s super fun to be involved with them.”

Wherever science and music take Juavinett in the future, she believes they will always take her in front of crowds, either to share her music, or to help spread her love of science.

“At the end of the day, that’s what I care the most about,”

she said. “I’ve been trying to decide, do I want to stay in pure research or do something bridging the scientific community with the rest of the world. I care tremendously what is science and what it’s doing that can help people understand their own lives a little better. The public doesn’t always have access to this information, or the info is not always good. There’s a tremendous gap between science knowledge and public knowledge. That’s something I’d like to see evolve. Why not make that information available, bridge the scientific and broader community?

“I feel like I always need to be doing some type of outreach or engagement, that’s ultimately what gives me meaning. I love research but I think the public engagement side of things is becoming more important to me. I enjoy teaching, too. I really enjoy public engagement. If I have some ability to do a mix of those things moving forward, that would be really great.”

Note: Ashley Juavinett is not affiliated with AlphaBioCom and did not receive any compensation for agreeing to be featured in this article. We simply felt she had a fascinating story to tell and we were excited to share it. You can follow Ashley on Twitter here and her Facebook music page here.