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Music has been central to human cultures for tens of thousands of years, but how our brains perceive it has long been shrouded in mystery.
Image credit: Chang Lab
Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have mapped exactly what happens. The cerebral cortex When one hears a melody.
It turns out to do two things at once: following the pitch of a note, using two sets of neurons that also follow the pitch of speech, and trying to predict what’s next. The notes will come in, using a set of neurons that are specific to music
The study, appears in Advances in scienceaddresses long-standing questions about melody processing in the brain’s auditory cortex.
“We found that some of the way we perceive melody is tied to how we perceive speech, while other important aspects of music stand alone,” said. Edward ChangMD, Chair of Neurosurgery and a member Weill Institute for Neurosciences at UCSF
Prediction of the next note
The first two groups of neurons turned out to be identical. Chang was identified in an earlier study. How we process changes in pitch gives speech meaning and emotion.
A third group of neurons, however, is devoted entirely to predicting melodic notes and is described here for the first time.
Chang’s team knew that something similar happens in speech: specialized neurons in the auditory cortex predict the sound, or phoneme, of the next speech, based on what the brain has learned about the words and their context. learned, just like a cell phone’s word prediction function. .
The researchers hypothesized that a similar group of neurons must be present to predict the melody.
Chang’s team tested this on eight participants who volunteered for research studies during their surgical work-ups for epilepsy. The team recorded brain activity directly from the auditory cortex while the participants listened to a variety of melodic phrases from Western music.
Then, they listened to the sentences spoken in English.
The hypothesis proved correct. The recordings showed that participants’ brains were using the same neurons to predict pitch features in both speech and music, but that specific neurons in each of these modalities were dedicated to prediction.
In other words, the auditory cortex wasn’t just looking for notes. It also had a specific set of neurons trying to predict which notes would come next, using what it already knew about melodic patterns.
“When we’re listening to music, two things are happening simultaneously,” Chang explained. “There’s a low-level processing of the individual notes of the melody, and then there’s this high-level, abstract processing of the context of those notes.”
This makes sense because our brains prepare to expect incoming information, say Narayan Sankaran, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in the Chang lab, who led the work. Listening to a melody can affect our emotions because the auditory neurons that process the music communicate with the emotional centers of the brain.
“Musicians talk about the tension and resolution of the music,” Sankaran said. “Our ability to anticipate and anticipate these qualities of music explains how it can set a rousing tone or move us to tears.”
But much remains to be learned about these connections.
“It’s clear that exposure to music enriches our social, emotional and intellectual lives and has the potential to treat a wide range of conditions,” Sankanran said. “To understand why music can provide all these benefits, we need to answer some basic questions about how music works in the brain.”
Source: UCSF
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