PATM Music and the Brain Flashcards
- What’s in a brain?
Made up of many folds as there is such a large surface area. Suffused with a very intricate blood supply. Oxygen and glucose are sent through the blood supply.
Weighs about 3b consistancy of blamonge.
- Describe a neuron/brain cell
A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals. These signals between neurons occur via synapses, specialized connections with other cells.
- What makes up a typical neuron?
A typical neuron is divided into three parts: the soma or cell body, dendrites, and axon. The soma is usually compact; the axon and dendrites are filaments that extrude from it.
- How do neurons send signals?
The cell body triggers an action potential (nerve impulse)
The axon carries the neural impulse.
It then makes contact with the dendrite of the next neuron.
- What is the synaptic cleft?
The end of the axon has branching terminals (axon terminal) that release neurotransmitters into a gap called the synaptic cleft between the terminals and the dendrites of the next neuron.
The neurotransmitters are kept within small sacs called vesicles, and are released into the synaptic cleft by exocytosis.
- How many lobes does the brain have?
4
- Frontal Lobe
- Porietal Lobe
- Occipital Lobe
- Temporal Lobe
- Where is the cerebellum in the brain?
The cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”) is a region of the brain that plays an important role in motor control.
It may also be involved in some cognitive functions such as:
- attention
- language
- regulating fear and pleasure responses
- What is the occipital lobe involved with?
The occipital lobe is divided into several functional visual areas. Each visual area contains a full map of the visual world.
- What is the temporal lobe involved with?
The temporal lobe is involved in primary auditory perception, such as hearing, and holds the primary auditory cortex
Also involved in the retention of visual memories, processing sensory input,comprehending language, storing new memories, emotion, and deriving meaning.
- What is the porietal lobe involved with?
The parietal lobe integrates sensory information among various modalities, including spatial sense and navigation.
- What is the frontal lobe involved with?
The executive function of the frontal lobes involve the ability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress socially unacceptable responses, and determine similarities and differences between things or events.
- What is the current consnsus on sharing of data between brain regions?
There is much more communication between the different brain areas than previously believed.
- Name three brain regions that we share with ancient ancestors.
- Amygdala
- Hippocampus
- Thalamus
- Describe the cerebral cortex.
The cerebral cortex is the outermost layered structure of neural tissue of the cerebrum(brain), in humans and other mammals.
It covers the cerebrum, and is divided into two cortices, along the sagittal plane, covering the left and right cerebral hemispheres
Humans have much more folded cortex than other mamals. The cerebral cortex plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness.
- How was the brain researched before modern techniques?
By looking at people who suffered, for example, gun shot wounds taking out certain brain functions and then looking at the brain in detail once the patient had died. This was difficult to develop theories. Brain imaging techniques have changed all this.
- What does EEG stand for?
– Electroencephalography (EEG)
Electroencephalography (EEG) is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp. EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain.
- What is Functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
fMRI picks up the changes in the blood supply. Inferring that there is more neural activity in certain brain regions.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) is a functional neuroimaging procedure using MRI technology that measures brain activity by detecting associated changes in blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases.
- What is Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a nuclear medicine, functional imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide (tracer), which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule.
- What is the difference between grey matter and white matter?
Brain cell bodies are grey matter and the white matter are the axons. White matter is the connections between neurons. They are white because they have a fatty substance around them called myelin. This insulation myelin sheath speeds up the signal.
- What are the black areas in a structural MRI brain scan?
**Cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) **
- How does MRI work?
MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields and radiowaves to form images of the body.
All tissues grey, white and CSF contain water that has charged particles. These are aligned using a large magnet. Normaly these water molecules (protons) are alligned at random.
A breif radio frequency pulse pushes the photons out of allignement with each other. The protons spin and relax back emmiting a signal that can be read. Depending on the speed of relaxation of the protons within either grey matter, white matter or CSF the signals will differ. This difference in speed forms a basis for constructing an image.
- Does pleasurable experiece in music “shivers down the spine” utlise the same brain areas as other pleasurable experiences such as eating?
Experimental condition and control.
Each participent brought their own “shiver” music that was used as the control for other participants.
The insula the prefrontal cortex and other pleasure centres are all activated.. highjacked by music.
Music can recruit pleasurable brain centers.
- Is there a single area in the brain for music?
No many brain areas are used in musical perception.
- Stewart et al. 2006 undertook a systematic literature review
39 case studies that fitted a strict set of control criteria. Looked at damage in patients to their.
- Pitch interval
- Pitch Pattern
- Tonal structure
- Timbre
Highlighted that damage to the right have problems with descriminating the direction of a pitch change. Primary auditory cortex is necessary for a simple contour.
Lesion led approach has also backed up the findings.
- What is the role of the primary auditory cortex?
The primary auditory cortex is the part of the cerebral cortex that processes auditory information in humans and other vertebrates. It is a part of the auditory system, performing basic and higher functions inhearing.
- When is musical contour processed and where?
There seems to be a hierarchy in music perception where the contour is deciphered first followed by the pitch.
This was established with behavioural experiments such as up down changes.
If there is only a difference in interval at one point it can be very hard to perceive as opposed to a difference in contour that has a greater salience.
Right temporal lobe contains the framework for contour perception.
- Congenital amusia affects 4% of the population describe it.
Patients can not descriminate pitch direction very well.
Natural speech and non speech condition the amusia are impaired at both.
Biological findings suggest there are structural differences in the temporal and frontal areas that may cause the problems.
- What area of the brain is used for timing in music.
Stewart et al. 2006 found that the temporal cortex is very involved.
The motor areas of the brain are activated by listening as well as playing instruments. We have a propensity to tap along with the beat.
- Timbre in music is located where in the brain?
Stewart et al 2006. Right temporal lobe is likely involved. When damaged music appeared tinny and lost much of its richness.
- What brain area is involved with emotion in music?
**The insular **
Damage to the insular stops people being able to engage with music in an emotional way.
One patient looses the ability to have “shivers down the spine”
- What did Griffiths et al, 2000 find out about musical hallucinations?
A lot of activation in the planum temporale
The planum temporale is a highly lateralized brain structure involved with language and with music. Although the planum temporale is found to have an asymmetry in the normal population, having a leftward bias in right-handed individuals, people who possess absolute pitch have an increased leftward asymmetry of the planum temporale. This is due to a smaller than average volume of the right planum temporale and not a larger than average volume of the left. The planum temporale may also play an important role in auditory processing with research suggesting that the region is responsible for representing the location of sounds in space.
- Music training and neural plasticity:
What did Amunts et al., 1997 study find?
Amunts et al., 1997 found that the post central gyrus was larger in violin players matching their left hand/right brain
Brains of professional musicians are physically different.
- Music training and neural plasticity:
What did Bangert et al., 2006 do?
Bangert produced photographs of the brain and had people rate the curved lines of the brains. The hand area of the motor cortex. (omega shape) can be seen with the naked eye.
Difference in the hemispheres. String players on the right and pianists on the left.. hand is mapped.
A greater degree of folding. More neurons.
- Do professional musicians hear their own instrument differently?
Pantev et al., 2001, 1995 showed that there is a bigger reponse by musicians to their instrument of expertise.
This suggests the function of the auditory cortex is shaped by the experitise of an individual
44.
What did Hauiesen and Knosche, 2001 highlight?
Professional pianists who heard music from their repoitoire activated the same motor areas in the brain as when physically playing.
Very specific regions showing the exact finger and thumb movments were activated.
Recruit motor activity in a very specific way down to individual finger movment.
- Griffiths et al., 2006 highlighted a patient who lost ability to enjoy music by damage to the **right temporal cortex. **
• The patient was a 52 year old male whose job involved working with and directing actors.
– an avid listener to music, both classical and jazz and was attuned to interpreting the structure and emotional content of both vocalizations and musical sequences.
– right temporal stroke, after which he noted a profound impairment in his perception of voices, environmental sounds and music. Although fully able to comprehend speech and recognize familiar voices, the quality of these sounds had changed: speech sounded as though it was being played out over a transistor radio.
– The patient recalled a particular occasion when he was attending a football match, his perception of the crowd’s roar in response to a goal was as if it were being produced via a disorted transistor radio that echoed round the ground.
– Environmental sounds such as birdsong had acquired a mechanical, machine-like quality, and the patients perception of music was altered as a result of a change in the quality of the tones produced by individual instruments.
– Listening to music was no longer a source of pleasure.
