H. Rose Schneider reports for the Times Union that scientists recreated Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” song using the brain signals from 29 patients at Albany Medical Center, in order to learn more about human brain activity. The study used electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain of patients suffering from disorders such as epilepsy to monitor signals. It took almost a decade for scientists at Albany Medical College, University of Florida, and University of California, Berkeley to reconstruct the song. Scientists chose this particular song because it is “a rich and complex auditory stimulus, able to elicit a distributed neural response” and also well-known. Researcher Peter Brunner, a professor of neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis and Albany Medical College, said, “The brain is very much spatially organized.... There are basically characteristics in music that map the spatial fields.” He explains that each time something happens in the song, one of the electrodes on the brain activates, and, with machine learning, those fragments are pieced together to build the song in a similar way to how speech is decoded from brain signals. Scientists learned from the study that music encoding occurred mostly in the right temporal lobe. “We can make sense out of incomplete information,” Brunner said. “A computer can do the same.” Read more about this story in the Times Union.