Our buddy, Dave Sulzer (aka “Dave Soldier”), and fellow scientist Roald Hoffmann run a very cool series called “Entertaining Science” at New York’s Cornelia Street Café. Dave’s pals - Dr. John Krakauer and musician Vince Bell And their next event is going to be happening this coming Sunday, May 8 at 6 p.m. Here’s Dave’s description of Sunday’s proceedings and for our NYC friends who might like to attend, here’s where you can get more details.

“Brain Trauma & One Man’s Music”

In 1982, Texas troubadour Vince Bell, who has been compared to Bruce Cockburn, Townes Van Zandt and Randy Newman, was broad-sided by a drunk driver after leaving the studio where he and Stevie Ray Vaughan had just recorded. He received a traumatic brain injury and spent a month in a coma. Vince will perform “One Man’s Music” on how he relearned to walk, talk, and play the guitar. Dr. John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is a clinician/scientist expert on recovery from stroke and brain injury. He’ll illustrate the changes within the brains of such patients, the wide range of outcomes, and results from his research on the treatment following these injuries.

As if conducting an Elephant Orchestra weren’t enough, Dave Sulzer (AKA Dave Soldier) is also famous in our minds for a project he did in the ‘90s with the Russian-American artist duo Komar & Melamid.

At that time, Komar & Melamid were already well known for their tongue-in-cheek, survey-based art project, “The People’s Choice: The Most Wanted Painting.” For the project they asked people about the specific aspects of art that they like and disliked, then used the results to create paintings that—statistically speaking—should be the “most wanted” and “most unwanted” paintings possible. Not surprisingly the resulting paintings were more humorous and thought provoking than fine art in their own right. You can view the results here.

To follow it up, Komar & Melamid decided to apply “The People’s Choice” formulae to music, surveying people on the various aspects of music that they liked/disliked the most. And that’s where our Dave comes into the picture…the story is best told (and heard) from here by this video:

Elephants as art is not a new concept. In 2002, Washington, DC hosted an exhibit called “Party Animals.” It consisted of 100 elephant and 100 donkey sculptures (the symbolism needs no explanation) that were decorated by local artists and displayed around the capital. The “Media Circus” elephant read the fine print. I took a safari through the city one day to find as many as I could, but my journey lasted much longer than the exhibit. For years after the animals had been auctioned off, I would stumble across ones I hadn’t seen before. They would sneak up on you—a bison camouflaged in a front yard or a butterfly elephant fluttering by a neighbor’s pool.

But those crafty creatures have turned the tables and reclaimed art for themselves. Though large and lumbering, the oversized mammals are quite talented—they perform delicate dances in circuses and, thanks to Dave Sulzer, can serenade you, too. So it should come as no surprise that elephants can also master other artistic endeavors. Party animal Ging Gaow painted this work of art.

Most of Thailand’s domesticated elephants once had jobs in the timber industry, but new regulations and deforestation have left these animals adrift without a log. The Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project decided to ensure the elephants’ survival by teaching them a new vocation—painting. The mammals’ art is sold to help the Asian elephant conservation effort. According to The National Zoo, an elephant trunk has over 40,000 muscles—more than all the muscles in a human body. That’s more than enough power to wield a paintbrush. Take a look!

So do elephants enjoy all of this creativity? According to Dave, they do. In fact, they might be the biggest “party animals” of all.

One thing that stood out for us during our interview with Dave Sulzer is when he told us he got bad grades for most of his time in high school. This, of course, seemed bizarre and shocking to us. How could this possibly have been? For crying out loud, the man is a NEUROSCIENTIST! When Dave got serious, he got really, really serious.

But it was true. And it’s true for lots of folks. We recently had a struggling high school student write in to ask Dave how he managed to turn things around in school. And Dave’s answer was so great that we wanted to highlight it here in its own post:

“Please don’t use me as an inspiration, I’m awful! I got into college because Michigan State, my alma mater, told me they would accept me if I got straight As on my last semester. So then I studied hard at that point, and they kept their word. I’m not sure they do that kind of thing anymore.

“Then I started to work harder in college when I decided I was interested in science and would like to go to graduate school, and you do need outstanding grades for that, and often some experience. Also, I saw some of my friends were getting very good grades, and I became a bit jealous and wanted to show that I could do it too, if I wanted to!

“Finally, my advice in college is that if you are interested in science is to volunteer to work in a science lab. Often if you do a good job and are energetic, careful, and patient it can turn into a real job and help you enter into that line of work. I worked in a Chinese cabbage breeding lab, which I admit sounds pretty odd in retrospect, but I learned about genetics and something about crop farming. It did help my introduction to botany and plant breeding, which was sort of my foundation in scientific work.”

A neuroscientist by day, Dave Sulzer explores synapses formed by the midbrain dopamine projections that underlie reward, learning and voluntary motor control. But by night, as Dave Soldier, he’s an avant-garde musician. Getting a second wind in retirement (Jonathan Michael Peel)

Should we be surprised, then, that he has such an appreciation for the artistic accomplishments of elephants? Or that he conducts an orchestra of multi-ton retirees from the logging industry? An orchestra that, boasts his partner in the enterprise, Richard “Professor Elephant” Lair, is “three-times the weight of the Berlin Philharmonic”?

Without a score or elaborate cueing and with few limitations beyond Dave’s deliberate gestures to start and stop them, these lucky instrumentalists play pretty much what they want and have a ball improvising on cymbals, gongs, renaats and harmonicas. Dave says some of the players don’t stop when he tells them to do so—even when they KNOW that’s what they should do—just for the fun of it! What teases!

If I asked you to name the animal that was most human-like, you’d probably say chimpanzee, right? It’s a good answer: we are close to them on the evolutionary tree, and our genomes are about 95% identical.

Are you smarter than an elephant? (CCBYSA: SuperJew) But if you limited the comparison to ‘high-level’ behaviors of humans—like feeling empathy, mourning the dead, or cooperating with others—then you’d find a lot of non-primates that are surprisingly similar to us. For example, like ours, the brains of humpback whales contain spindle cells, neurons that are thought to be involved in advanced thinking, self-awareness and communication. Dolphins can categorize objects, learn an artificial language, and recognize themselves in a mirror, according to some studies.

Then, of course, there’s the wise old elephant. Loads of studies attest to the elephant’s keen mental abilities, but I want to point out a new one that’s particularly cool. Scientists have demonstrated that two Asian elephants will patiently work together to get a sweet snack—even without any previous training. The study was published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You can read more about exactly how the researchers set up this clever experiment (and see a video!) at Wired Science.

The Dallas Zoo recently opened an exhibit called “Giants of the Savanna.” A new group of four elephants was brought in to join the elephants, Jenny and Gypsy, already living there. The two groups, separated between the new savannah and the original pen, rumbled back and forth. Jenny and Gypsy exhibited snorkeling behaviors to learn about the newcomers. An elephant’s ability to interpret olfactory information comes from their highly developed Jacobsen’s organ and sensitive trunks. The new elephants have since been introduced and while still separated within the savanna, the two groups have been in touch. Smells Like Calf Spirit! (Arutemu)

So I already had elephants on my mind when Dave Sulzer’s videos appeared. The elephant music astounded me. The idea of giving elephants marimbas, mallets, and drums was novel and strangely exotic. I loved the sounds they made and was curious about the connection between their music and their communication. I wanted to learn more about how elephants converse and get to know one another.

Serendipitously, I’d recently received a copy of Elephant Talk by Ann Downer – but had been waiting until the perfect opportunity arose to read it. After seeing Dave’s elephants making music, I had to read it.

As a new teacher blogger for ”Secret Life,” I’ve been ruminating about the topic of my first blog post. To that end, I decided my best approach would be to simply navigate through the site and see what caught my interest.

We dare you to sum up your work in 30 seconds! My first stop was this week’s “30 Second Science” episode featuring Neuroscientist Dave Sulzer. I have long been a fan of Sixty Second Science podcasts and have often incorporated them into my lessons. But 30 seconds? Is that enough to deliver content?

Reminding myself that most commercials are 30 seconds or less, I clicked play and watched. I was amazed. It will take most readers longer than 30 seconds to read this blog post—but they won’t get the depth of knowledge they will get by watching a 30 Second Science episode!

After viewing the “30 Second” segment, I was curious enough to watch the longer segment (at only 1:56) entitled “Impossible Questions.” In fewer than 5 minutes, the episodes deliver robust knowledge appropriate for any classroom. I’m now a fan! And I look forward to sharing my thoughts on how you can use “Secret Life” in your classroom over the coming months.

Listening to Dave Sulzer talk about teaching elephants to play music really hit home for me. He began by finding out that elephant trainers and owners all know that elephants love music. From there, he moves right to, “If they like music, can they learn to play music?”

An elephant never forgets his notes! As an educator, I often try to use what my students love to help them learn. I remember one student, “Joe”, who struggled with reading and writing. But he loved art. He would pore over art books and watch videos about artists. So I used his love of art to help him demonstrate his knowledge. “How would Picasso teach us about this book? What would the main character look like? What would the setting be?” Soon, he was creating a book report in the style of Picasso. He was so excited to have “Picasso” paint about the book, that he didn’t even realize how much he was studying the text to get everything right.

Then there was “Debbie” who hated math. She could never remember her math facts, which made higher level computation quite difficult. But she was an amazing musician, playing both piano and violin quite well. I had her compose songs to help her learn her math facts. She enjoyed the project so much that she kept creating songs to memorize other information, too. At one point, she created a song as a study guide for a social studies test we were having. I posted her song on our website and many other children accessed this tool to assist them, also.

Helping students find what interests them is an important part of being a teacher. We work to expand their horizons, giving them experiences they might never have without us. Once students know what they are passionate about, learning about their passion comes easy. Using that passion to learn more, helps students feel more engaged in school and understand more about the required concepts. Just like the elephants, who learned to play the music they were passionate about hearing, children will learn when they use their passions. Our job? Help them find a way.

Dave Sulzer was a musician long before he was a neuroscientist. And he’s been in a succession of great bands and worked with high-profile musicians like Bo Diddley, David Byrne, and John Cale (not to mention a certain group of five-ton musicians from Thailand). Some songs do require soldiering - Dave on far left In fact, Dave made a living as a musician during college and grad school. And being a scientist-by-day, musician-by-night was never a problem for him until he got an invitation to tour overseas:

“All my traveling and performing had been in the States. And I got an invitation in my first year of grad school to do a small tour of Britain. And I went to the department chair and I said, ‘Is it okay if I go to Britain? This is really an amazing opportunity for me and I’d love to do it.’ And he said, ‘Okay, you can do this. But you have to come back and not play music anymore. You have to single-mindedly devote yourself to scientific research.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’

“When I got back to the States [after the tour], I knew the department chair didn’t want me to play music. So I just started spelling my name differently for music. My real name is Dave Sulzer and sometimes people would hear it and think I was saying ‘Dave Soldier.’ In fact, one of the bandleaders I worked with called me that for about a year before he realized ‘Soldier’ wasn’t my last name. And even I didn’t realize he was saying that. So, I started using the name, ‘Dave Soldier,’ when I played music. And I kind of fibbed to the department chair. And other people figured out that I was still playing music at night sometimes, but it was a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of situation.”

So in the grand tradition of other pseudonymed artists such as Mark Twain, Pee-Wee Herman, and Crazy Eyes Killa, Dave continued (and continues) to have a successful musical career as Dave Soldier. And he has no regrets at all about his ongoing not-so-secret life:

“I remember very clearly that I felt if I didn’t write music and play, I’d go crazy. You know, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. And I think it’s that way for a lot of musicians. You don’t necessarily even want to do it. But you do it because you love it so much that you can’t not do it. You can’t stop yourself.”

And the whole music thing doesn’t seem to have held back his science career at all.

Soldier on, Dave.

Dave Sulzer has some friends who weigh 10,000 lbs… EACH.

So be nice. Ask Dave your questions in the comments. And the elephants might play a song for you.

UPDATE: We are no longer taking more questions for Dave. But check out his answers in the comments. He may have answered a question you were going to ask!