PRI: Science and Creativity from Studio 360

We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from.

After piano music helped him recover from brain surgery, Dr. Richard Fratianne became a true believer in music therapy. In the burn unit at the Cleveland MetroHealth Medical Center, Fratianne is measuring patients' stress hormones during procedures to try to prove that music therapy reduces pain and anxiety. Produced by Kerrie Hillman.

Biochemist David Baker helped create a computer game called "Foldit" that thousands are playing around the world. But it's not about commercial success. Baker wants to analyze the structure of proteins, and it turns out that humans are a lot smarter at this than supercomputers. The game? It's an incentive. As Studio 360's Sarah Lilley discovered, it's a

Science writer Jonah Lehrer is just 26, but he's already worked as a line cook at Le Cirque and in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer looks at the surprising ways artists like Paul Cezanne and Walt Whitman had insights into neurological concepts that scientists have taken years to prove. Produced by Sarah

When NASA launches the space shuttle, mission control wakes up the astronauts every morning with a song. But that's not the only music heard in outer space. The astronauts often bring instruments with them to play. We asked Richard Paul to find out what it's like to rock out in space.

Biologist Bernie Krause believes animals communicate with each other on their own frequencies, and when you put all those frequencies together, they interact in a way not unlike a symphony orchestra. He calls it "biophony." Jill DuBoff talked to Krause about his research in the wild.

Chris Adrian's novels tell dark, fantastical stories that draw on his experience working as a pediatric oncologist. Adrian tells Kurt how writing helps him deal with the emotional burden of the medicine he practices. Anne Marie Nest reads selections from Adrian's forthcoming novel, The Great Night.

A little over a year ago, an international group of scientists and artists set sail for the Arctic. They were bound for a group of frozen Norwegian islands halfway between the top of continental Europe and the North Pole. KCRW's Matt Holzman joined the adventure.

"I Am Art" is a daring show at New York City's Apex Art. It presents the work of four different plastic surgeons. On display are photos and videos of all types of procedures, from cleft palate reconstruction to cosmetic nose jobs. Produced by Studio 360's Sarah Lilley.

Homo-Thespian

Medical students spend hours studying information on charts and graphs, but when was the last time they studied the meaning behind a good story? We visited a group of OB/GYN residents taking a narrative medicine class to see how embracing fiction can improve patient care. Produced by Erin Davis.

Mario Livio is Senior Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, headquarters of the Hubble Telescope. Kurt and Mario talk about how science and human expression find common ground in the language of symmetry.

Ingmar Riedel-Kruse runs a biophysics lab at Stanford University, but he spends about half his time tinkering with videogames. He's not playing World of Warcraft. Riedel-Kruse creates his own videogames using living microbes.

David Eagleman, author of Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, is a neuroscience researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. When he can't test his ideas with experiments, he just writes them as fiction. Produced by Mark Anderson.

Kurt talks to David Freedberg about what mirror neurons do for us when we look at art. Freedberg is an art historian at Columbia University, but much of his work in recent years has focused on the connection between art and neuroscience.