Get To Know Just How Your Brain Responds To Music

Music has a powerful effect on the human body and many times it seems like the response is involuntary. You may not even know the song or the lyrics, but immediately you recognize the sound, you find your foot tapping to the beat. It is not something you actually plan to do. Interestingly, even if the song is not on your playlist or even among your favorite genres, the effect is the same. It actually takes a lot of conscious effort to avoid swinging to the beat especially when you realize that the lyrics are abusive or inappropriate. This has sparked interest among scientists and lots of researches have been done to find out more about music and the brain. The following insights from a post by Natalie Angier will help you understand a little on how your brain works: Music in everyday life Studies have shown that there is evidence of the existence of music way before civilization began and therefore it has been part of human life for a long time now. Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux. Via New York Times Even today, music seems to be part of all our daily activities in ceremonies, including both formal and informal set-ups, and even in the mundane tasks of life. Even in the business world, music has become an essential component of advertising. Why? A Part of the Brain There is a part of the brain that is responsible for detecting and interpreting sounds. It is connected to the auditory nerve in the ears and enables you to distinguish what you hear. This piece of knowledge, however, is actually quite old. On the other hand, with the interest in discovering why there seems to be a universal response to music, scientists went on a quest as described below: Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology, and the quest to understand the neural basis of a quintessential human passion foundered. Via New York Times Image Courtesy of Public Domain Pictures A New Discovery Curiosity continued to push scientists to find out if there is a music-specific part of the brain and continual research prevailed over the years. The following recent discovery brings a new understanding to how the brain works in response to music: Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No […]

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