As the house band for author and counter-culture icon Ken Kesey's notorious acid tests, the Grateful Dead made music perfectly suited for mind-bending exploration. With the Mickey Hart Band, the Dead's longtime drummer and Grammy-winning percussionist Mickey Hart continues this fantastic voyage of discovery with his new album, "Superorganism," on which he transforms actual brain waves into music, with the aim of better understanding our brains, ourselves, and the world around us.

Keep on Truckin': Mickey Hart, making [brain] waves, at 70

Download.com chatted with Hart about turning brain waves into music therapy on "Superorganism," file sharing, whether spirituality and software can ever work in tandem, and what it was like to be part of perhaps the most mythologized rock band of the 20th century.

So I've read that there is all this neuroscientific work being conducted at University of California, San Francisco that's enabled your work on the "Superorganism" album and tour. The thing about the Bay Area is that it has the latest technology in many fields. So being able to access brain wave functions, stem cells, DNA, heart rhythms -- that's what is happening down there in Mission Bay. It's all biomedicine and very energetic scientists finding the keys to the mysteries of many things, life being one of them; rhythm and vibration is the basis of all life, so it's per... [Read more]