New study shows different brains have similar responses to musicPosted by Willumsen Mikkelsen on February 15th, 2021 Do the brains of people paying attention to the identical part of music actually respond in the identical way? An imaging study by Stanford University School of Medicine scientists says the answer is yes, which may in part explain why music plays this kind of big role within our social existence. The investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging to spot a distributed network of several brain structures whose activity levels waxed and waned in a very strikingly similar pattern among study participants while they paid attention to classical music they'd never heard before. click to find out more will be published online April 11 inside European Journal of Neuroscience. "We spend time and effort playing music—often in groups, and frequently together with synchronized movement and dance," said Vinod Menon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and also the study's senior author. "Here, we've shown the first time that despite our individual differences in musical experiences and preferences, classical music elicits an incredibly consistent pattern of activity across individuals in many brain structures including those involved with movement planning, memory and attention." The notion that healthy subjects answer complex sounds in a similar way, Menon said, could provide novel insights into how people with language and speech disorders might pay attention to and track information differently in the everyone else. go right here is one in the group of collaborations between Menon and co-author Daniel Levitin, PhD, a psychology professor at McGill University in Montreal, dating back when Levitin was obviously a visiting scholar at Stanford several years ago. To make sure it turned out music, not language, that study participants' brains will be processing, Menon's group used music that have no lyrics. Also excluded was anything participants had heard before, in order to eliminate the confounding effects of having some participants who had heard the musical selection before although some were hearing it the first time. Using obscure items of music also avoided tripping off memories for example where participants were the 1st time they heard the selection. The researchers chosen complete classical symphonic musical pieces by 18th-century English composer William Boyce, proven to musical cognoscenti as "the English Bach" because his late-baroque compositions in certain respects resembled that regarding the famed German composer. Boyce's works fit well into the canon of Western music but you are little seen to modern Americans. Next, Menon's group recruited 17 right-handed participants (nine men and eight women) between the ages of 19 and 27 with minimum musical training with no previous familiarity with Boyce's works. (Conventional maps of brain anatomy derive from studies of right-handed people. Left-handed people's brains often deviate from that map.) While participants heard Boyce's music through headphones making use of their heads maintained in a fixed position in a fMRI chamber, their brains were imaged for over nine minutes. During this imaging session, participants also heard 2 kinds of "pseudo-musical" stimuli containing one or another attribute of music but without others. In one case, all the timing information within the music was obliterated, such as rhythm, with an effect quite like a harmonized hissing sound. The other pseudo-musical input involved maintaining the identical rhythmic structure as within the Boyce piece however with each tone transformed by way of a mathematical algorithm to a different tone in order that the melodic and harmonic aspects were drastically altered. The team identified a hierarchal network stretching from low-level auditory relay stations within the midbrain to high-level cortical brain structures linked to working memory and attention, and beyond that to movement-planning areas in the cortex. These regions track structural portions of a musical stimulus as time passes periods lasting approximately several seconds, with each region processing information according to its very own time scale. Activity levels in a number of different places inside the brain responded similarly from individual to another location to music, but less so or otherwise not at all to pseudo-music. While these brain structures are already implicated individually in musical processing, their identifications had been obtained by probing with artificial laboratory stimuli, not real music. Nor had their coordination with one another been previously observed. Notably, subcortical auditory structures within the midbrain and thalamus showed significantly greater synchronization in response to musical stimuli. These structures are actually considered to passively relay auditory information to higher brain centers, Menon said. "But if they were just passive relay stations, their responses to both forms of pseudo-music would are already just like closely synchronized between individuals regarding real music." The study demonstrated, for the first time, that people structures' activity levels respond preferentially to music in lieu of to pseudo-music, suggesting that higher-level centers inside the cortex direct these relay stations to closely heed sounds which might be specifically musical naturally. The fronto-parietal cortex, which anchors high-level cognitive functions including attention and memory, also manifested intersubject synchronization—but only in reply to music and only within the right hemisphere. Interestingly, the structures involved included the right-brain counterparts of two important structures within the brain's left hemisphere, Broca's and Geschwind's areas, recognized to be crucial for speech and language interpretation. "These right-hemisphere brain areas track non-linguistic stimuli including music in the same way that this left hemisphere tracks linguistic sequences," said Menon. In any single individual playing music, each cluster of music-responsive areas seemed to be tracking music on a unique time scale. For example, midbrain auditory processing centers worked approximately in real time, as the right-brain analogs in the Broca's and Geschwind's areas did actually chew on longer stretches of music. These structures might be essential for holding musical phrases and passages planned as part of making a feeling of a piece of music's long-term structure. "A novelty of our own effort is that we identified brain structures that track the temporal evolution with the music over extended periods of energy, comparable to our everyday example of music listening," said postdoctoral scholar Daniel Abrams, PhD, the study's first author. The preferential activation of motor-planning centers in reply to music, in comparison with pseudo-music, implies that our brains respond naturally to musical stimulation by foreshadowing movements that typically accompany music listening: clapping, dancing, marching, singing or head-bobbing. The apparently similar activation patterns among normal individuals make it more likely our movements will probably be socially coordinated. " Preschool music class Sydney may be extended to some amount of research domains which involve interpersonal communication. We are particularly enthusiastic about language and social communication in autism," Menon said. "Do youngsters with autism tune in to speech the same way as typically developing children? If not, how are they processing information differently? Which brain regions are from sync?"Like it? Share it! More by this author
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