Hagar

Fried cited the work of Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, a postdoc in his lab, who, as described in a 2008 paper, found that when subjects were shown a variety of film clips while researchers recorded the activity of single neurons in their hippocampus and surrounding areas, a subset of those neurons fired in response to a particular concept — there was one neuron, for example, that began firing at the start of a clip from "The Simpsons" and continued firing despite the changing images on the screen.

Sammy Hagar has been one of rock music’s most visible personalities for over half a century — from his days fronting Montrose in the early 1970s through his stint as Van Halen’s singer in the mid-1980s and early ’90s to his perch in recent decades atop the Cabo Wabo booze-and-bars empire.

Yet these days, Hagar says, “I seem to get along better with guys in the country world than with most rock stars.”

Kenny Chesney, Ronnie Dunn, the late Toby Keith — Hagar counts each as not only a dear friend but also a kindred spirit.

Consider that overlap one reason Hagar, 77, is high on the bill for this weekend’s Stagecoach festival in Indio, where he’ll perform alongside some of Nashville’s biggest stars, including Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Brothers Osborne and Ashley McBryde.