Meet the coolest fish in school who are ready to party as soon as MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This starts playing.
Rebecca Poulsen, a.k.a. BeXta, is an Australian DJ studying neuroscience at the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute.
As a part of her sound experiments, Poulsen placed baby zebrafish inside a chamber, played them various noises whilst scanning their brains with a laser, and examined the results through a microscope.
The results have been published in the journal Current Biology and oh boy are they funky. One of the sounds that Poulsen serenaded the fish with was MC Hammer’s 1990 hip-hop track U Can’t Touch This and something about the tune made the teeny, tiny fish boogie – at least inside their brains.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the video over and over again to see if there are neurons that respond to the bass or the vocal. In my opinion, there’s something there,” Poulsen said. “You can see when the vocal goes ‘ohhh-oh’, specific neurons light up and you can see it pulses to the beat. To me it looks like neurons responding to different parts of the music.”
Can #zebrafish encode the unique properties of sound? Like pure tones vs white noise, or different shaped waveforms? Our new #preprint from @labEthan says yes! Check out our example with @McHammer! Can you find the vocal neurons? #auditory #phdLife #HammerTime 1/ pic.twitter.com/8hYIUBDjBW
— BeXta (@djBeXta) September 22, 2020
MC Hammer himself stopped (Hammertime!) by Twitter to share a link to Poulsen’s research. “That’s awesome,” Poulsen told The Guardian.
Broad frequency sensitivity and complex neural coding in the larval zebrafish auditory system | #Hamm400aos 🎧 https://t.co/fNvM4yzW7v
— MC HAMMER (@MCHammer) September 22, 2020
Poulsen is researching how zebrafish brains respond to sound, as she thinks they could teach scientists something about autism. “Once we know how the zebrafish processes sound, we can then look at auditory processing in our zebrafish models that have altered genes that are strongly linked to autism.”
Between the club scene in Brisbane and the lab, Poulsen is certainly making waves.
