Montreal Neuro, St. George's Students Work Together on Ground-Breaking Research

Does studying music improve your short-term memory for sounds? Can an MRI scan diagnose a concussion by measuring fluid movement in the patient’s brain? These are two cutting-edge research questions being investigated by students at St George’s School of Montreal; a private co-ed elementary and high school education at 3100 and 3685 The Boulevard in Westmount. The students are conducting these and other research projects under the guidance and assistance of the Montreal Neurological Institute; known locally as the ‘Montreal Neuro’ or MNI.

The joint Neuro/St. George’s program is called the ‘MNI Partnership Project’. Created by MNI director Dr. David Colman and MNI CRU director Dr. Angela Genge – both of whom are St. George’s parents – the MNI Partnership Project brings together a selected group of St. George’s science students to meet MNI researchers in a casual roundtable setting. “The researchers took turns telling us about their areas of expertise,” says St. George’s grade 11 student Anna-France Meyer. “This gave us the chance to find out about areas that interested us, and then to work with the right MNI graduate student in developing an actual, testable research question.”

The MNI Partnership Project student/researcher roundtables are held at the end of grade 9 or the start of grade 10. During the grade 10 academic year, the students gather information related to their area of interest. In grade 11, they work with their MNI mentors to execute the research and document the results for the annual St. George’s Science Fair in February.

Anna-Frances Meyer won first prize in the 2010 St. George’s Science Fair, for her research into the relationship between formal music education and auditory short-term memory. Using 30 test subjects in a properly-controlled experiment – under the mentorship of MNI graduate student Mary-Ellen Sutherland – Meyer showed that people with formal musical training were more successful in remembering randomly-combined sequences of musical melodies and phonemes (the shortest syllable in any given word).
“My hypothesis was people with formal musical education would get higher scores when tested on what they remembered,” Meyer says. “To be conclusive, the test would need to be run with a larger group of subjects. But the test scores we got strongly suggest that formal musical education improves your ability to remember sounds on a short-term basis. (See sidebar for more details on Meyer’s experiment.)

This year, St. George’s grade 10 student Harry Glickman and Josh Ward are working with the Neuro, looking at ways to detect concussions using MRIs (magnetic resonance imagers) and fluid diffusion (movement) in the human brain. “We know that different fluids have different diffusion rates, which means they move at different rates through the brain,” Glickman says. “What we want to do is measure this movement in a group of athletes at the start of the season, and then take MRIs to check the diffusion in those who have subsequently had concussions. If we can detect a consistent difference, we may have the beginnings of a diagnostic tool for detecting concussions quickly.”
The MNI Partnership Project is giving science-minded St. George’s students their first steps into research. It’s an exposure that have spurred the minds of Anna-France Meyer and Harry Glickman; both of whom want to pursue their research in CEGEP and university.

“This project is giving our students the chance to direct their own enrichment, which is what we like to do at St. George’s,” says Head of School James Officer. “It’s the students who establish their research concepts, and then they make them happen with the Neuro’s help. They then go on to include their research and results in their grade 11 Science Fair projects. Students who learn to think creatively and then translate their thoughts into quantifiable, realizable goals are also the students who succeed in life. That’s just part of what St. George’s teaches them to do.”

(James Careless, May 2010).