Week 5 Lecture 5 - music and the brain Flashcards
What are the properties of music?
- Universal– all cultures ever described have some form of music
- Unique - you don’t need to be human to sing e.g., Birds
- Context specific for birds: neural and hormonal changes vs. many contexts for
humans - Function: only male birds sing: attract mate, defend territory
What is the function of music?
- Human musical tendencies derived from a system for attracting mates (Darwin, 1871) –>evolutionary
- music exists because it brings people together - social cohesion which lead to survival benefits (Huron, 2001)
- Precursor for language (Mithen, 2005)
- “Music is auditory cheesecake” – evolutionary byproduct of the adaptation
for human language (Pinker, 1997) –> comes as a result of the language pathways
How does sound travel from ear to brain?
- sound vibrations travel to the ear
- Outer ear: amplifies certain frequencies, important for locating sounds
- Middle ear: converts airborne vibrations to liquid-borne vibrations
- Inner ear: converts liquid-borne vibrations to neural impulses
What is the order of the structures in the ear?
- pinna
- ear canal
- tympanic membrane
- ossicles –> malleus, incus, stapes
- cochlea
- auditory nerve
How does sound travel from the inner ear to the brain?
- Medial geniculate nucleus projects to primary auditory cortex (also called “core”)
- Core area is surrounded by secondary auditory cortex
- Information ascends and descends in the pathway
- The auditory nerve and auditory cortex have a tonotopic organization
Give some examples of brain functions that music engages
- Emotion
- Memory
- Learning & plasticity
- Attention
- Motor control
- Pattern perception
- Imagery
Give some examples of cortical brain areas that music activates
- motor cortex –> movement e.g., dancing
- sensory cortex –> sensory feedback e.g., from playing an instrument
- association cortex –> memory and associations
- auditory cortex –> auditory perception and analysis
- visual cortex –> visual perception e.g., reading music
- cerebellum + BA47 –> emotional reaction to music
- BA44 –> expectancy generation e.g., violation and satisfaction
Give some examples of sub cortical brain areas that music activates
- hippocampus –> memory and associations
- visual cortex –> visual perception e.g., reading music
- cerebellum + nucleus accumbens + amygdala –> emotional reactions to music
- corpus collosum and PFC –> expectancy generation e.g., violation and satisfaction
Music is characterised by perceptual attributes
How can these independently vary?
can vary in:
pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, contour, loudness, and spatial location
What does the brain organise the perceptual attributes of music into?
organises into higher level concepts:
meter, harmony and melody
true or false
Musical and linguistic grammar allow for the generation of infinite number of
songs or sentences through combinations and rearrangements of elements
true
true or false
pitch is organised in every culture
true
Is pitch organised into musical scales?
- divides each octave into 12 distinct notes
What is some evidence that we are born “musical”?
- Hearing working at 4-6 months
- Infants, unlike monkeys, have natural preference for consonance
- Easily notice changes to contour (ups and downs)
- Understand phrase structure in Mozart
- At 3 days old infants can distinguish different rhythms
An fMRI was used to measure brain activity in 1- to 3-day-old newborns while they heard excerpts of Western
tonal music and altered versions of the same excerpts
What was found?
- Western music: right-hemispheric activations in primary and higher order auditory cortex
- Atonal music: activations emerged in the left inferior frontal cortex and limbic structures
- infant brain shows a hemispheric specialization in processing music as early as the first postnatal hours
- neural architecture underlying music processing in newborns is sensitive to changes intonal key
How does musical ability develop?
- Newborn – perceive and remember pitch sequences, perceive a beat, sensitivity to contour, preference for consonance
- 4-6yrs – Respond to tonal more than atonal music
- 7yrs – Sensitive to the rules of harmony
- 10yrs – Understand finer aspects of key structure
- 12yrs – Develop tastes and recognition of styles
What is the “Mozart effect”?
The “Mozart effect” refers to claims that people perform better on tests of spatial abilities after listening to music composed by Mozart
What did a test investigating the Mozart effect find?
Paper cutting and folding test:
- Mozart group performed better than Albinoni Group and better than silence
- further experiment found that the Mozart effect is an artifact of arousal and
mood
What is congenital amusia?
a lifelong disorder characterized by a difficulty in perceiving, or making sense of, music
How are amusics affected by pitch perception?
amusics often require the change to be much greater, for example, close to the distance between the first two notes of Somewhere over the Rainbow
What do people with amusia score in normal range for?
rhythm perception, although this
aspect of the disorder seems variable
What are some characteristics of amusia?
- Amusics report having the condition for as long as they can remember
- Unaware when music, including your own singing, is off-key
- Difficulty discriminating or recognizing melodies without lyrics
- Disliking of musical sounds and avoidance of public places and situations where music occurs
- Unlikely to “use” music in everyday life or experience reactions such as chills,
relaxation or mood enhancement
Why is amusia interesting?
- Sheds light on cognitive, neural and maybe even genetic basis of normal
musical processing - How much are musical capacities associated with other skills (language,
spatial awareness) - Possible origins of other developmental disorders such as dyslexia, prosopagnosia (faces) and dyscalculia (numbers)
Who was the first documented case of congenital amusia?
Monica
What pitches could Monica detect?
Monica can detect a pitch change of 11 semitones if and only if the pitch change is
rising, not when it is falling – not a working memory problem
What is going on in the brain of amusics?
Hyde et al. (2006) measured white matter density between the right frontal and temporal lobes:
- Amusics white matter was thinner = a weaker connection.
- Severity of Amusia = Thinner white matter
Do patients with congenital amusia show an increase or decrease in cortical thickness?
- increase
- Differences in cortical thickness may have compromised the normal development of right fronto-temporal pathway
A study measured ERPs in amusic participants while they monitored sequences for the presence of pitch change
What did they find?
- Lack of responsiveness to semitone changes that violate musical keys,
difference seen in P600 component - Amusics can track quarter tone pitch differences, showing an early right-lateralized negative brain response – but they are UNAWARE
What is the common origin of music and language?
overlapping functions and shared circuity
True or false?
Sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from our capacity to process music
True
A study had 12 amusics make judgments about emotional expressions of spoken phrases
What did they find?
- Music and language share mechanisms
that trigger emotional responses - Common evolutionary link between
language and music
What is the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH)?
Syntax in language and music share a common set of circuits instantiated
in frontal brain regions
What did a study testing the SSIRH do and find? (shared syntactic integration response hypothesis)
2 sentences:
- The woman paid the baker and take the bread home – P 600
- The woman paid the baker and took the zebra home – N 400
The responses are highly similar in the
vicinity of 600 ms after the onset of the
incongruity –> converged around 600ms
What 2 things can music elicit?
- psychological (mood)
- physiological changes –> the chills effect (shivers, goose bumps, tingling)
What is music induced emotion?
euphoria or the chills effects has been shown to recruit reward-motivational circuit:
- basal forebrain, midbrain, orbitofrontal regions and deactivation in
amygdala
What does a decrease in amygdala activation when listening to music that gives you chills suggest?
anticipation of the chill, rather than the chill itself
An fMRI was given to ppts listening to music that gave them chills.
What was found?
- Deep & ancient areas: N Acc, Orbitofrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area
- Reward system in the brain - dopamine
Instrumental music = abstract but
accesses the same brain areas important for survival
What are some uniquely human behaviours surrounding rhythm?
- anticipatory (tapping to a metronome – people tap a bit ahead – anticipation)
- flexible (tap, clap, double the rate)
- robust (syncopation)
- cross modal (something you hear – movement)
- auditory (patterns – complex tap – visual pattern – flashes of light – temporal info
through eyes – hopeless)
What are the brain structures used to help you keep the beat of music?
- motor structures
- basal ganglia (part of the motor circuit) - time intervals, control sequences of move
Why do we move to the beat?
- A key structure involving timing beats (basal ganglia) is involved in motor
control - In vocal learning the same structure creates a strong connection auditory
input and motor output - Chimps can’t move to the beat
How does musical experience affect practice, performance and skill transfer?
- Auditory perception consequence of dynamic processes involving cortical
and subcortical regions –> reflecting both bottom-up and top-down processing - Overlap: auditory and motor systems interact closely during both perception and production
Ohinishi et al. 2001 compared musicians to non-musicians in a passive (music) listening task
What did they find?
- Brain activation differences in Planum Temporale and Dorsolateral Prefronatal Cortex – especially on the left side
- Differences are in or near speech production and comprehension regions
In very broad terms:
- musical training seems to push music processes onto language structures
- Left lateralization for musicians
- Left posterior temporal gyrus (near Wernicke’s)
- Left lateral frontal cortex (near Broca’s)
