TTC Video – Music and the Brain

TTC VIDEO – MUSIC AND THE BRAIN

There is a belief in hypnotism and NLP.

There are 8 DVD’s and 1 PDF.

DVD

We wouldn’t have it any other way. It is possible to bring tears to our eyes and send shivers down our spine. Background swells add punch to movies and TV shows. At ballgames, organists bring us together. Parents sing to infants.

Since the dawn of culture, we have been making music. All known societies throughout the world have had music, because early humans were already playing bone flutes, percussive instruments and jaw harps. Our appreciation seems to be innate. As young as two months, infants will turn to pleasant sounds and away from dissonant ones. There is a box on page 42. ]. The pleasure centers in a person’s brain light up when he or she listens to a symphony, eats chocolate, or takes cocaine.

There is an intriguing biological mystery about why music is so important to us. Is it possible that its emergence enhanced human survival, as suggested by the University of New Mexico? Is it possible that it helped us by promoting social cohesion in groups that had grown too large for grooming? To use the words of Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, is music just an accident of evolution that tickles the brain’s fancy?

Neuroscience doesn’t have the ultimate answers. We have begun to gain a better understanding of how music is processed in the brain, which should help answer evolutionary questions. There is no specialized brain center for music in studies of patients with brain injuries. Music stimulates many areas of the brain that are involved in other types of cognitive activity. Individual experiences and musical training can affect the active areas. The ear has fewer inner hair cells than the eye. Even a small study can change the way the brain handles musical inputs.

There are Inner Songs.

Until the advent of modern techniques, scientists gleaned insights about the brain’s inner musical workings mainly by studying patients who had experienced brain deficits as a result of injury, stroke or other ailments. Maurice Ravel, a French composer, may have been afflicted with focal cerebral palsy, a disorder in which areas of brain tissue are damaged. He could still play scales and hear his old compositions. He couldn’t write music. His proposed opera. The name of the person is Jeanne d’Arc. I told a friend that this opera is in my head. I will never write about it. It is over. I can’t write music anymore. An unsuccessful procedure led to the death of Ravel four years later. The case supports the idea that the brain doesn’t have a specific place for music.

Music and speech were processed independently according to the experience of another composer. After suffering a stroke in 1953, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, could no longer talk or comprehend speech, yet he continued to write music until his death 10 years later. The supposition of independent processing appears to be true, although more recent work has yielded a more nuanced understanding of two of the features that music and language share: both are means of communication, and each has a set of rules that govern the proper combination of elements. According to the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, a region of the brain that deals with language and music is different from the other parts of the brain.

We have a pretty good idea of the brain’s responses to music. When placed in the context of how the ear conveys sounds to the brain, these results make sense. The box is on the opposite page. ]. Similar to other sensory systems, the one for hearing consists of a string of neural processing stations from the ear to the highest level of the cortex. The inner ear (cochlea) sorts the sounds produced by a violin into their elementary frequencies. As trains of neural discharges, the cochlea transmits this information along separately tuned fibers of the auditory nerve. The trains reach the temporal cortex. Different cells in the brain respond to different frequencies and neighboring cells have different tuning curves so that there are no gaps. The auditory cortex forms a Frequency because neighboring cells are Tuned to similar frequencies.

The response to music is more complex. The perception of music depends on grasping the relations between sounds. The parts of the brain involved in processing music. Tone refers to both the frequencies and the loudness of a sound. When the frequencies were detected, investigators suspected that cells would respond the same way.

In the late 1980s, David Diamond, Thomas M. McKenna, and I were working in my laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, and raised doubts about the idea of rising and falling pitches. We used the same five tones and then recorded the responses of single neurons in the cortices of cats. The number of discharges varied with the shape. Responses depended on the location of a given tone within a melody; cells may fire more vigorously when that tone is preceded by other tones rather than when it is the first. Cells react differently to the same tone when it is part of a descending or complex one. The pattern of a melody is more important than the simple relaying of sound in a telephone or stereo system.

Rhythm, harmony, timbre, and the relation of two or more simultaneous tones are all related to melody, but they are also of interest. According to studies of rhythm, one hemisphere is more involved than the other. Different tasks and different stimuli can demand different processing capacities. When the listener is trying to discern rhythm while hearing briefer musical sounds, the left temporal cortex is more involved than the right temporal cortex.

For harmony, the situation is clear. When subjects are focused on aspects of harmony, the cerebral cortex is more active in the right temporal lobe. Timbre has a preference for the right temporal lobe. If tissue from the right but not the left hemisphere is excised, patients show deficits in discriminating timbre. Normal subjects become active in the right temporal lobe when they discriminate between different timbres.

Brain responses are dependent on experiences and training. Training can change the brain’s reactions. Scientists used to think that tuning was done for each cell in the auditory cortex. We suspected that cell tuning might be altered during learning so that certain cells become more sensitive to sounds that attract attention and are stored in memory.

When a subject learns that a certain tone is important, we asked if the basic organization of the auditory cortex changes. guinea pigs were presented with many different tones and recorded the responses of various cells in the auditory cortex to determine which tones produced the greatest responses. The subjects were taught that a specific, nonpreferred tone was important in order to signal for a mild foot shock. Within a few minutes, the guinea pigs were aware of this association. The cells were determined again immediately after the training, and at various times up to two months later. The signal tone had shifted the tuning preferences of the neurons. Learning reprograms the brain so that more cells respond best to certain sounds. A greater area of the cortex processes important tones when the cellular adjustment process extends across the cortex. One can determine which frequencies are important to an animal by determining the organization of its auditory cortex. The box is on the opposite page. ].

Over time, the retuning became stronger without additional training and lasted for months. A growing body of research shows that one way the brain stores the learned importance of a stimuli is by using more brain cells. Brain-imaging studies can detect changes in the average magnitude of responses of thousands of cells in different parts of the cortex, even though it is not possible to record single neurons in humans during learning. In 1998 Ray and his colleagues at University College London trained human subjects in a similar type of task by teaching them that a particular tone was significant. Learning produces the same type of tuning shifts seen in animals. The long-term effects of learning can help explain why we can recognize a familiar melody in a noisy room and why people with Alzheimer’s can still recall music that they learned in the past.

We can listen to music even when there is no sound. Play any piece you know in your head. Where in the brain is the music coming from? Zatorre and Halpern conducted a study in 1999 in which they scanned the brains of people who listened to music or imagined hearing the same piece of music. The areas that were involved in listening to the melodies were also activated when those melodies were imagined.

Well-developed brains.

The brain has been shown to be able to revise its wiring in support of musical activities. When training increases the number of cells that respond to a sound, there are changes in the brain. Musicians, who usually practice many hours a day for years, show such effects, their responses to music differ from those of non musicians, and they also exhibit hyper development of certain areas in their brains.