Advanced Brain Technologies Blog inTime and OPERA?? - Yes!..Believe It or Not! (Part 1 of 2)

inTime, Advanced Brain Technologies' rhythm and sound frequency-based music listening method, was launched on February 7, 2014. It is a program of firsts for music listening therapy -the first listening program to be of the world music genre and rooted in rhythmic percussion music, the first music listening therapy to emphasize both temporal (time) structure and frequency, the first program to be entirely originally composed and psychoacoustically crafted to enrich each of the four basic acoustic features - time, frequency, amplitude and spatiality, and the first Advanced Brain Technologies program to include activities in the method. Within these past two years, nearly 400 providers from 21 countries have attended training courses; listeners have reported inspiring changes linked to inTime; and research has taken place and is underway, including the first controlled group study of inTime outcomes. During the period of inTime's creation and production, neuroscientist Ani Patel, PhD introduced OPERA (no you haven't missed something... Dr. Patel is not composing operas!). Rather, as a researcher and theorist, he has offered a hypothesis that specifies why musical training benefits neural encoding of speech, or neurons' representation of speech stimulation with electrical signals. He proposed that music processing has the potential to meet five conditions which engage adaptive plasticity in speech processing networks, OPERA (Patel, 2011). OPERA - essential conditions for adaptive neural plasticity Overlap - There is an anatomical overlap in brain networks that process acoustic features used in both music and speech. Precision - In comparison to speech, music places higher demand for precision of processing within shared brain networks. Emotion - Musical activities that engage shared networks evoke strong positive emotions, Repetition - repeat frequently, Attention - and are associated with focused attention. With the expansion of OPERA (Patel, 2014), Dr. Patel proposed that when sensory or cognitive processing mechanisms [...]