New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’

 

New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’

By Natalie Angier  Feb 8, 2016 (NYT)

"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.

"Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.

"'In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. 'There are theories that music is older than speech or language,' he said. 'Some even argue that speech evolved from music.'

"Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played."