SmArts

October 17-23, 2016

Music makes our brains work

By Molly Rector

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a fictional journal composed by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the character Brigge records his feelings about music, saying that he has always been distrustful of it, “not because it lifted me out of myself more violently than anything else, but because I had noticed that it never dropped me again where it had found me.”

This quotation bears striking resemblance to the rationale for a study published last month in Helsinki, in which researchers report on a new method for studying brain activity. Making the observation that music has a “strong and unique influence” on the human mind, the research team questioned whether extended exposure to musical stimuli might be used to more effectively study the relationship between auditory processing and brain activation. They found that it did, since the brain is easier to stimulate with “natural stimuli” like music than with other kinds of polyphonic sound stimuli that have been used in the past.

The study involved the playing of several extended excerpts of Bizet-Shchedrin’ Carmen as played by the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra. During the playing of this music, they recorded the brain activity of 20 professional musicians, 20 dancers, and 20 people who do not work professionally in either field. The results suggested some differences between the brain activity in each group, but no difference in sensitivity to the stimuli that associate movement with timing and coherence – meaning training in these fields likely does not modify the listener’s ability to anticipate movement cues.

The authors (members of the departments of Behavioral Science, Music, and Learning at Finland’s Univeristy of Helsinki and University of Jyväskylä) found that “in addition to the complexity of the physical sound waves,” which helps visualize brain activity, “the human cognition and emotion become much more versatile with the natural musical stimulus” – which means the method gives researchers to more kinds of information at once.

Ultimately, the researchers believe that since the brain is so sensitive to music, this method of brain imaging will be useful, in the future, for determining the depth of comas, estimating the outcome of vegetative states, and for estimating the effectiveness of various mental health treatments.

How neat is that?

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.