MUSIC SCIENCE DISCOVERIES
Los Angeles Times Headlines, November 9, 1998
Music:
Study Shows Link to Basic Mental Activity
FINDINGS: Melody, harmony, and rhythm stimulate areas responsible
for memory and other basic activities.
By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Science Writer
The music that makes the foot tap, the fingers snap and the pulse quicken stirs
the brain at its most fundamental levels, suggesting that scientists one day may
be able to retune damaged minds by exploiting rhythm, harmony and melody, according
to new research presented Sunday.
Exploring the neurobiology of music, researchers discovered direct evidence
that music stimulates specific regions of the brain responsible for memory, motor
control, timing and language. For the first time, researchers also have located
specific areas of mental activity linked to emotional responses to music.
In the long run, music could become a way of retooling brains afflicted with
a variety of emotional disorders or neurological diseases, the researchers said.
"That’s our goal," said neuroscientist Anne Blood, who conducted
the study at McGill University in Montreal. "You can activate different parts
of the brain, depending on what music you listen to. So music can stimulate parts
of the brain that are underactive in these disorders. Over time, we could retrain
the brain in these disorders."
The findings, presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Los
Angeles, underscore how music-as an almost universal language of mood, emotion
and desire-orchestrates a wide variety of neural systems to cast its evocative
spell.
"Undeniably, there is a biology of music," said Harvard University
Medical School neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo. "There is no question that
there is specialization within the human brain for the processing of music. Music
is biologically part of human life, just as music is aesthetically part of human
life."
In a series of new studies made public Sunday, researchers found that the brain:
- Responds directly to harmony. Using a medical PET scanner to monitor changes
in neural activity, neuroscientists at McGill discovered that different parts
of the brain involved in emotion are activated depending on whether the music
is pleasant or dissonant. "Everyone knows music can produce powerful emotional
effects. This suggests different emotions are represented in different parts of
the brain," Blood said.
- Interprets written musical notes and scores in an area on the brain’s
right side. That region corresponds to an area on the opposite side of the brain
known to handle written words and letters. So, in studying the brains of expert
musicians, researchers uncovered an anatomical link between music and language.
"We are guessing [the area] is involved in the visual processing of the score
itself," said Lawrence Parsons at the University of Texas in San Antonio.
"On the left, the same area is involved in reading."
- Grows in response to musical training the way a muscle responds to exercise.
In a study of classically trained musicians, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center in Boston discovered that male musicians have significantly larger
brains than men who have not had extensive musical training. The area of the brain
called the cerebellum, which contains about 70% of the brains neurons, was about
5% larger in expert male musicians. Researchers, however, found no such size increase
in the brains of female musicians, but said they may not have studied enough women
to be certain.
"Musicians are not just born with these differences," said Dr. Gottfried
Schlaug, the neurologist who conducted the research. The cerebellum grows as a
result of the constant practice of the virtuoso motor skills needed to play an
instrument, he said.
Overall, music seems to involve the brain at almost every level.
Even allowing for cultural differences in musical tastes, the researchers found
evidence of music’s remarkable power to affect neural activity no matter
where they looked in the brain, from primitive regions found in all animals to
more recently evolved regions thought to be distinctively human.
"We find that harmony, melody and rhythm had distinct patterns of brain
activity. They involved both the right and left sides of the brain," Parsons
said.
Melody affects both sides of the brain equally. Harmony and rhythm seem to
activate the left side of the brain more strongly than the right side.
The neural mechanisms of music may have originally developed as a way of communicating
emotion as a precursor to speech, the researchers suggested, offering insights
into how the mind integrates sensory information with emotion and meaning.
Already researchers are looking for ways to harness the power of music to change
the brain.
Preliminary research in laboratory animals and humans suggests that music may
play some role in enhancing intelligence. Indeed, so seductive is the possibility
that music can boost a child’s IQ that politicians in Florida, Georgia and
other states are lobbying for schoolchildren to be exposed regularly to Mozart
sonatas, although such research has yet to be replicated or confirmed.
The scientists Sunday said the new research could help the clinical practice
of neurology, including cognitive rehabilitation. As a therapeutic tool, for example,
some doctors already use music to help rehabilitate stroke patients. Surprisingly,
some stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak retain their ability
to sing, and that opens an avenue for therapists to retrain the brain’s
speech centers.
"Patients sing what they want to say and some improve their fluency,"
Parsons said.
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