The task was not easy; brain scan experiments produce millions and millions of data points; a single session can take up the entire hard drive on an ordinary computer. Analyzing the data in the standard way—just to see which areas are activated, not the new type of analyses we were proposing—can take months. And there was no “off the shelf” statistical program that would do these new analyses for us. Menon spent two months working through the equations necessary to do these analyses, and when he was done, we reanalyzed the data of people listening to classical music we had collected.
