Music room of the brain
Scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have discovered the music room of the brain, in a bid to get to the bottom of why human beings respond to music so naturally.
Some of the earliest instruments created by human beings, dates as far back as forty three thousand years ago; music has therefore always been a primary part of our existence and evolution.
Scientists were determined to find out just which part of the brain it is that responds to music. What they have found is a music room of the brain so to speak. It’s an aspect of the brain dedicated to detecting and interpreting music.
The researchers developed a new approach to brain imaging that earlier studies had missed.
“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. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.”
They have also found that this cortex or music room of the brain only responds to music. It completely ignores other every day sounds like cars skidding, toilets flushing, and dogs barking.
The brain has six basic response patterns to incoming noise. In the ten volunteers that they used for the survey they determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, such as pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, revealing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.
“The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it. That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.” Said Dr. Norman-Haignere
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