Growing up, Dr. Lara Boyd never thought she would become a neuroscientist. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and a Master’s degree in physical therapy, Dr. Boyd started her professional career as a physiotherapist. During this time, she encountered many patients who had suffered strokes and head injuries, and she soon became frustrated with the lack of effective treatments available to help them recover.
“I felt like a car mechanic who didn’t know how the engine worked, and yet people brought me their cars and asked me to fix them,” she recalls.
Driven by her desire to understand how a damaged brain can change, Dr. Boyd left her job and pursued a PhD in Neuroscience/Kinesiology at the University of Southern California.
At the time, neuroplasticity was still a developing field. The common belief was that after childhood, the brain became hardwired like a machine, inflexible and fixed in function. If a particular area of the brain was damaged by stroke, it was believed that those functions were irreparably lost.
“However, we now know that our brains, unlike machines, have the capacity to grow and change throughout our lives, shaped by our experiences and habits,” Dr. Boyd explains. The recognition of neuroplasticity has revolutionized stroke recovery, allowing a more optimistic and dynamic path to rehabilitation.
Today, Dr. Boyd is a neuroscientist, physiotherapist and director of the Brain Behaviour lab at UBC, where advanced multimodal imaging techniques are used to enhance knowledge of brain functions and behaviours. Her research, informed by her experience as a physiotherapist, focuses on how the process of neuroplasticity rewires the brain to improve therapeutic interventions for stroke patients.
Her team uses advanced technologies like transcranial magnetic stimulation, functional and structural MRI, robotics and electroencephalography to understand how the damaged brain recovers and learns.
Motor outcomes after stroke vary, as individuals must relearn old motor skills and adapt to new challenges. Ongoing work in Dr. Boyd’s lab focuses on optimizing motor learning in stroke patients through the study of neuroplastic changes to enhance rehabilitation interventions.
By continually adjusting the difficulty of learning tasks for patients – ensuring that they remain challenging yet achievable – her team saw significant improvements in learning and neuroplasticity.
“I think that all of us have a unique capacity for change, and I think we can optimize that capacity for change,” says Dr. Boyd.
Currently, her lab is designing interventions for stroke recovery using semi-immersive gaming technology. The difficulty of the games is adjusted based on individual needs and daily variations, aiming to facilitate maximum neuroplastic change. The goal is to deploy these games into the community to study changes in behaviour, recovery and brain function.
The Wall Opera Project
Dr. Lara Boyd is also collaborating with researchers from the School of Music and Department of Psychology on the Wall Opera Project initiative.
“First of all, I’m not musical,” she says. “I love music, but I have no talent. However, I have a daughter who’s very musical and it came to her very organically.”
Watching her child play the piano and sing throughout the years sparked her academic interest in music. After a fateful encounter with Nancy Hermiston, chair of the UBC School of Music’s Voice and Opera Divisions, Dr. Boyd became a Peter Wall Scholar, aiming to explore the intersection between opera and neuroplasticity.
“I didn’t know much about opera when Nancy first approached me but learning from her and now going to many operas, I’ve realized that opera is not just music,” she notes. “Music is just a slice of it. Those performers, they’re paying attention to the other performers on stage and the conductor, they’re making music that’s extremely difficult, while dancing and acting, and interestingly, they’re often doing all of this in a language which they don’t speak, or a second language.”
With such a unique combination of high-level skills, Dr. Boyd gained the impression that opera would be “the ultimate brain challenge,” mixing “sport, social environment change, music and language all in a pot.”
Alongside Nancy Hermiston and Dr. Janet Werker, she embarked on an insightful journey into the intricacies of opera and the brain with the UBC Wall Opera project. Funded by the Peter Wall Institute, this unique project explores how intense opera training shapes the brain. At the beginning of the study, participants – UBC opera singers, actors, and athletes – underwent a series of brain scans and an assessment of educational abilities and memory. After a year of training, the participants were reimaged and reassessed to offer detailed insights into educational and neuropsychological changes. The project is just wrapping up after starting in 2019, with the team working hard on intense data analyses.
As a side project, some of Dr. Boyd’s postdoctoral fellows have conducted additional investigations into stress and opera performance, further adding to our understanding of opera and the brain. Initial trends in the data suggest the existence of musical talent and cognitive enhancement through music, but there are no definitive conclusions yet.
“It’s been a long journey but we’re finally getting to the end of it,” Dr. Boyd reflects. “Or rather, to the next step, as we’re never at the end – I’m sure there will be a whole bunch of new studies that stem off from this one.”
Lastly, she highlights the rich collaborations this project has brought her.
“I know brain imaging, but I don’t know opera and I don’t know language. And Janet Werker knows some brain imaging, she’s an EEG expert and knows language development.” Dr. Boyd explains. “And then we have Nancy Hermiston, who is an expert in music, voice and opera. So that’s the fun part about being in a multidisciplinary environment at UBC, where we can bring together unique sets of expertise and build them into something brand new.”
