How the mind and body make music

Our brains are constantly at work. They continuously execute instructions for the body via millions of firing neurons and synapses that coordinate unconscious bodily functions, conscious thought, and movement. 

The complex connection between mind and body—which is still only partially understood—is something Samuel McDougle says we may be taking for granted. 

“Why is it that we have robots that can write essays about Victorian poetry, but can’t fold laundry in a reasonable amount of time?” he wondered, noting that there is still so much to learn about the relationship between cognition and movement that the process has yet to be fully replicated in machines. “That’s why it’s hard to successfully design robots capable of folding our laundry—because of the motor control problem,” he explained. “We know how joints work, and we know how muscles work, but we don't really know how the brain is able to produce such flexible motor behavior.”

McDougle is Assistant Professor of Psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), where he conducts research in psychology and neuroscience. Using methods including computational modeling, neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and observing behavior, McDougle seeks to understand the brain’s abilities, particularly when it comes to motor skills. 

His work earned him the 2024–25 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research from the FAS, which celebrates outstanding research conducted by ladder faculty members in the social or natural sciences who are untenured at the time that the work is completed or published.

In addition to the Greer Memorial prize, McDougle has won other notable awards in his field. Last year, he received the Society for the Neural Control of Movement’s 2024 Early Career Award, and in 2019, he received the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. 

He described receiving the Greer prize as “delightful” and expressed his gratitude for the support and recognition of neuroscience research, saying that “understanding the brain will help us understand ourselves.”

“The brain is arguably the most complicated object in known existence,” McDougle pointed out. “Doing basic science on this really complicated object is just so important.”

The movement behind music

Professor by day, folk and bluegrass musician by night, McDougle’s research helps illuminate the basic science behind how our brains and bodies collaborate to make movement, which allows us to create art and music. 

“I’ve always been interested in that relationship between thinking about the format of music and performing music. Whether it's melody or cadence or dynamics—all those things are very cognitive features—and then we apply those cognitive representations to the control of our movements,” he said. “What’s going on at the cognitive-motor interface? This is the main, broad question driving my lab’s work.”

As the principal investigator of the Action, Computation, and Thinking (ACT) Lab, McDougle explores human learning and memory by examining the interconnected processes between cognition and motor control. His lab consists of eight full-time members, two post-docs, four graduate students, two research assistants, and three to four undergraduate students at any given time.

He’s particularly interested in the “rich, complicated computations” of so-called muscle memory—a colloquial term McDougle calls a misnomer. The work of muscle memory is done by the nervous system and the brain, not the muscles themselves, he explained. “I think that misnomer sort of tells the whole story of how we typically only think of motor skills as these thoughtless acts.” 

In one ongoing study, McDougle is examining the cognitive operations behind playing music. With the help of his graduate student Juliana Trach and former Yale undergraduate Tolu Adanri, he assembled a group of 30 pianists, who range from five to 25 years of experience. The research team tasked each pianist with playing notes on a digital keyboard while being timed by a metronome. The study investigates what “lies at the interface of this cognitive skill, which is parsing this complicated arrangement of symbols, and the motor skill of quickly pressing the correct keys on a piano,” McDougle explained.

Through computational modeling, he uses the data from observing participants’ reaction times and errors to reverse engineer how the brain of an expert sight-reader goes from looking at a piece of music to producing an action—playing that music. 

While the lab is currently measuring music sight-reading skill by measuring the actions of participants, they hope to incorporate additional data collection methods to measure skilled action, such as electromyography (EMG)—a technique for recording the electrical activity of muscles—eye tracking, and eventually brain measurements as well.

Skills that are commonly associated with expert motor control, such as playing an instrument, often incorporate a multitude of memories, McDougle said. He compared sightreading to reading another language. 

“It’s somewhat like any other type of reading, but that cognitive process is directly interfacing with the activation of the muscles of the arms and hands,” he explained, noting that expert sight piano reading is “a really nice way for us to study how these well-learned skills, that we colloquially call ‘muscle memory,’ are actually using almost every part of the brain to produce an intelligent action.”

McDougle's work has applications that go beyond the study of recreational and everyday movement. Studying the brain and improving our understanding of the mental processes behind movement can help researchers and care providers develop new rehabilitation strategies for people with motor impairments, such as those who have survived a stroke.

“At the end of the day, the point of the brain is for us to behave adaptively in the world, and behaving in the world is moving,” McDougle said. “If we can’t understand how the brain and the mind produce intelligent movement, we’re really not understanding the whole point of the brain in the first place.”

Teaching the next generation of scientists

Alongside his own research, McDougle is an avid collaborator and mentor to other scientists investigating the brain's many mysteries—in this generation of scientists and the next. 

He will put those mentoring skills to good use as the faculty director for a new graduate certificate, Brains, Minds, and Machines, offered by the Wu Tsai Institute and Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“To make progress in understanding the brain and cognition, you need to have knowledge and some skill in a range of disciplines,” McDougle told Yale News about the new certificate. “In that sense, we’re training future scientists—neuroscientists and psychologists and linguists and physicists who are interested in understanding the mind and brain—to have a bigger intellectual toolkit.”

The three-year certificate is open to graduate students from all departments who are interested in developing their biological, psychological, and computational research skills, and will begin accepting applications for first-year PhD students beginning in Spring 2026.

“We’re very excited about it, and that’s been a fun role for me to now step into because it’s really interdisciplinary and collaborative,” he said of his position as faculty director.   

“Interacting with creative, young scientists has just been awesome,” he said of his time teaching and mentoring at Yale thus far.

“Being a mentor was never something I envisioned being as fun as it is.  It is challenging, but it’s also fun, and I’m enjoying that so much.”

To nominate an FAS faculty member to be featured in this series, please email fas.dean@yale.edu.