It can choose sing over speech
There are sounds all around us; just use those flaps on the side of your head. The funny thing is what might be a nothing or worthless sound to one person can be music to someone else, an organized sound with a rhythm. Music has effects on something behind the ears that most people call ‘the brain’.
According to Norman M. Weinberger in “Music and the Brain”, people react differently to the same sounds; “exhilarating orchestral crescendo can bring tears to our
eyes and send shivers down our spines”. Music has been around for over 30,000 years when humans were making instruments from bones and teeth.
Many organs of the body are involved in the perception of music, like other senses. The response from the human is hard to pinpoint because there are many parts of the brain involved in comprehension like tones, a part of music; a tone includes frequency (how often the instrument or part of the ear vibrates) and the loudness of the sound. At the same time there are many parts of music; most research has focused on melody but there has also been on harmony and timbre. Research has found that humans respond similar to guinea pigs when they hear music.
During the 1990s researchers exposed guinea pigs to many different tones and recorded the responses of cells in the auditory cortex – part of the brain that processes sound. Then, to learn which tones produced the greatest responses they taught the subjects (the guinea pigs) that a specific, nonpreferred tone was important by making it a signal for a mild foot shock, aka when the subjects heard the tone they got a shock in their foot. The guinea pigs learned this association within a few minutes; they were smart!
In 1998 Ray Dolan and his colleagues at University College London did a similar experiment on humans; they taught the human subjects that a specific tone was significant. It’s been seen that humans remember music and identify it; have you ever noticed that even if you’re in a noisy room but your favourite song is playing you can recognise it? Research has found that people with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s might lose the ability to speak – forget words and meanings but recall music they learned in the past.
Even if there is no music, it is there. Try it, you can remember music that you like even if you’re reading this in a library. In 1999 Andrea R. Halpern of Bucknell University and Robert
J. Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University conducted a study entitled “Brain organization for music processing”. They scanned the brains of nonmusicians who either listened to music or imagined hearing the same piece of music. It was found that the same areas of the temporal lobes were involved whether the subject was listening to or imagining the music. Many parts of the temporal lobes showed activity in both activities; the brain was listening.
In 2008 Clinical Medicine published a piece by Jason Warren, “How does the brain process medicine?” Research was conducted using MRIs. Here it is also shown that the temporal lobes play a role in processing music. It is equated to processing language. At the same time it is not a straight hierarchal process and different parts of music each play a role.
Pitch is a part of music that constructs melodies, chords, and harmonies. Analyses of brain scans showed the right hemisphere of the brain more active in processing pitch. The other side of the brain, the left, is more involved in verbal processing. Other parts of the brain are involved in other parts of processing music.
Weinberger also writes that collectively, research through persons with injured brains and healthy persons shows no central region for music but engages different parts of the brain. At the same time the ear is the sensory organ with the fewest sensory cells. Based on this the tongue should more easily, be able to sense if there is more salt than usual in dad’s soup while the ear should have a harder time of sensing that mom’s guitar note was off-key. Only “3,500 inner hair cells occupy the ear versus 100 million photoreceptors in the eye”.
It’s been found that listening to music lights up regions of the brain primarily responsible for other tasks. While listening to a musician playing an instrument the cerebellum and motor cortex are active. These areas are involved in planning and performing specific, precisely timed movements. Dancing is done in tune, performed, and movements in a lot of dances are planned and precisely timed.
Although they are considered to involve separate parts of the brain, speech and music are similar. Both have a syntax (set of rules to make sure it is properly understood) and both are a means of communication. They are considered separate because before the origin of brain imaging, in 1953 a Russian composer, Vissarion Shebalin, couldn’t talk or understand speech but was able to continue to write music until his death 10 years later. Later imaging studies suggest that a region in the frontal lobe enables construction and the proper syntax of music and language but other parts of the brain are involved in processing.
Yet studying music in the brain has been complicated because it involves so many different parts of the brain in the listening, comprehension, creating, and producing. In “How does the brain process music?” (Clinical Medicine, 8:1, February 2008), Jason Warren writes that one reason music comprehension by the brain is so hard because music is multidimensional – pitch, tune, timing, melodies, chords, harmonies, and others. At the same time study of patients who have suffered strokes, temporal lobectomy, or other forms of focal brain damage has helped science learn more about music processing in the brain. This process is not perfect as the “symptom-led approach is vulnerable to ascertainment bias and lesion
heterogeneity” while providing insight.
Processing music is a complex process in the brain. The human brain can do it. Are humans really that smart?
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