New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/science/new-ways-into-the-brains-music-room.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&mtrref=www.nytimes.com

by sew • 10 years ago

51 15 10 years ago

nytimes.com

EwanG• 10 years ago

Key quote from the article: "By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music."

xkcd-sucks• 10 years ago

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26687225

jaza• 10 years ago

Very cool stuff. I remember my first year of high school - in our first music class, we were taught: "what is music?". According to the teachers, and the dictionary, "music is organised sound".

Never seemed like a satisfactory answer to me. And finally I have confirmation: the world's brightest scientific minds, at MIT, in 2016, are only just now cracking the surface of this complex question.

The word "music" has been in the human vocabulary forever. But how does the brain actually define music, and classify it as "not noise", at a neurological / chemical / acoustic level? This field has been little more than guesswork until now. Very exciting times.

Houshalter• 10 years ago

I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html

Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?

The theory is that the brain seeks "novelty" and gets pleasure from it. If your brain tries to predict the next note and fails, synapses adjust slightly and it learns. It gets better at predicting its inputs. Learning these new patterns gives you reward, and encourages you to seek novelty like that in the future. Randomness doesn't cause new learning, neither does predictable patterns you already know.

cfcef• 10 years ago

So music is a superstimulus for learning?

vinceguidry2• 10 years ago

Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict.

You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls into a 'rut' in my head and becomes a platform on which I can have all kinds of related thoughts and experiences.

When I'm of a mind to do so, I might listen to a particular piece of music hundreds of times over the course of a week or two.

Here is an article that describes a similar kind of practice:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-fo...

Just because you can predict what's happening next doesn't make it boring. You just chose to make it boring.

quaristice• 10 years ago

This comment is outrageously pretentious and I respectfully disagree with your ridiculous conclusion.

ENTP• 10 years ago

I too have this experience and have 2 albums I listen to daily that I find helps me concentrate.

pizza• 10 years ago

You can make something that has previously been salient become yet more salient by noticing more in it; the two of you are not necessarily disagreeing.

jlewallen• 10 years ago

Interesting read. Though my comment is on a benign technical detail. There were links in the article to other articles that I expected to work given how recently the article was published. For example, I was interested in reading about the 40k year old flutes - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/oldest-%20musical-... Curious that the link would appear at all. I'd think there would be constraints on this during publication?

rayuela• 10 years ago

Link to the paper: http://web.mit.edu/svnh/www/homepage/Publications_files/Norm...

Terr_• 10 years ago

Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.

I've long had a pet-theory that music with voices in it interrupts my train of thought (especially while programming) in a way that instrumental/electronic music avoids.

Of course, if unnamed scientists discover that listening to voices is completely separate from writing text, that'd be evidence against it.

byroniczero• 10 years ago

“Very few drums or vocals” is one of the qualities valued by the Music for Programming podcast: http://musicforprogramming.net/?about

pjdorrell• 10 years ago

In 2015 I developed a theory that the human response to music is a mutated copy of an evolutionary pre-cursor, and the most likely pre-cursor is a response to speech-like sounds, where this response plays a role in the initial learning of language. I have documented the development of my theory in my "What is Music?" blog at http://whatismusic.info/blog/.

In their analysis of the human auditory cortex, Norman-Haignere et al found six distinct functional groups of neurons. One of those groups is identified as a "music area". Another one of the groups is a close match for the evolutionary pre-cursor that I predicted - a group of neurons that respond to speech sounds, whether or not those sounds belong to the listener's native language.

The initial assumption of my theory is that the primary function of music is to temporarily alter mood. Evidence for this function comes from the strong effect that music has on some people who are "addicted" to daydreaming.

My theory suggests that the response to speech-like sounds also induces an altered mood, when an infant is learning language for the first time. This alteration in mood helps the infant to identify language as a special stimulus which is important and which needs to be processed and understood as something that follows its own peculiar and complex set of rules which are not particularly related to the rules that describe all the other aspects of reality that the infant is learning about. The altered mood may also help the infant to learn that the meaning attached to some language utterances relates to things beyond immediate reality, ie things that other people are thinking about which are not in the "here and "now". (This would relate to the similar effect that music has on our emotional reactions to things we are thinking about that are not in the "here and now".)

New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’

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