Neuroscientist’s invention can bring harmony, heal brain
Flavio Fröhlich created a noninvasive device that enables scientists to tune brainwaves’ strength, timing and synchronization to treat depression.
A patient with depression sits comfortably in Flavio Fröhlich’s UNC-Chapel Hill lab, wearing an electrode-covered mesh over her head. The mesh measures and stimulates brainwave activity. As technicians watch her brainwave patterns on a small monitor, they incrementally adjust them to relieve her depression.
Fröhlich’s research team perfected the system through years of clinical testing. Now, he’s exploring whether music can heal the brain just as effectively.
“The brain’s rhythmic patterns we’re deciphering are analogous to our experience of music and a musical piece’s evolution through synchronization and shared timing. We use music as a theoretical framework as we learn the brain’s language and as we develop novel treatments that instead of delivering simple stimulation waveforms and inputs to the brain, offer nuanced, more sophisticated individualized treatment,” Fröhlich said.
A professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s psychiatry department, Fröhlich directs the Carolina Center for Neurostimulation. His research focuses on developing noninvasive, nonpharmacological treatments for psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety. He studies the brain as an electrical system, mapping complex patterns of neural signals that underlie perception, mood and thought.
“We form a closed-loop system where we listen to the brain and then respond to it, adjusting stimulation moment to moment based on what’s actually happening,” Fröhlich said.
At the research’s core is the idea that brain rhythms allow humans to process sensory input, organize information, generate new ideas and experience emotion. When those rhythms become disrupted — as they often do in psychiatric illness — cognition and mood can suffer.
Fröhlich compares brain activity to an audio equalizer used to tune frequency bands up or down. Just as music engineers visualize sound by tracking which frequencies dominate and how they align in time, neuroscientists use the device to examine the strength, timing and synchronization of brainwaves.
That conceptual overlap between music and neuroscience eventually led to a major clinical breakthrough. After years of research and clinical trials, Fröhlich’s lab developed a noninvasive brain stimulation device called XCSITE, approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The device, which resembles a tricked-out hairnet, delivers extremely weak electrical currents to the scalp, subtly altering brain rhythms associated with depression and anxiety. Pulvinar Neuro, a neurotechnology company co-founded by Fröhlich, offers the XCITE technology.
The need for new approaches is substantial. According to the National Institute of Mental Health’s most recent tabulation, approximately 14.5 million U.S. adults experienced at least one major depressive episode with severe impairment in 2021.
XCITE delivers rapid, personalized treatment. The device records a person’s unique brain activity using EEG sensors, then automatically determines the next input to the brain. “It’s not a before-and-after approach,” Fröhlich said. “It’s a constant loop of measuring and responding.”
Because the currents are weak, patients experience little to no physical sensation.
Fröhlich and Dr. David Rubinow, distinguished professor and chair emeritus of psychiatry, led a clinical trial that found a significant reduction in symptom severity among participants with major depressive disorder. Two weeks after treatment, 80% of people no longer met the clinical criteria for depression.
While electricity has been the lab’s primary tool, Frohlich has long wondered whether sound, especially music, might influence the brain in comparable ways.
One set of experiments focused on a specific brain rhythm that occurs during sleep and supports memory formation. Researchers demonstrated that they could boost the rhythm by delivering carefully timed auditory patterns. The team extended this approach to music, finding that active participation — playing, moving or improvising — affected stress responses differently than passive listening.
“We’ve taken small but hopefully meaningful steps toward translating what we learn from brain stimulation back into music-based interventions,” Frohlich said.
