Music and the Mind

Music and the Mind

• Plato (428 BC) believed that music can elevate or degrade the mind.
• Plato stated that "rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul".
• Aristoxenus (4th century BC) viewed the effects on listeners, not just mathematical ratios.
• Early belief was that music for every kind of psychiatric or mental illness, music is the cure.

What is Music?

• Edgar Varèse: "Music is organised sound".
• Leonard Mayer: Music is "a form of emotional communication".
• Wittgenstein: A new exemplar can be considered music if it bears a "family resemblance" to other examples generally agreed to be "music".

Properties of Music

• Music is universal, present in all cultures, even without instruments.
• Music is unique, as non-humans, like birds, sing.
• For birds, music is context-specific, involving neural/hormonal changes, unlike the varied contexts for humans.
• The function of music for male birds is to attract a mate and defend territory.

Function of Music

• Darwin (1871) proposed that human musical tendencies are derived from a system for attracting mates.
• Huron (2001) suggested music brings people together promoting social cohesion and survival benefits.
• Mithen (2005) viewed music as a precursor for language, using neural architecture.
• Pinker (1997) described music as "auditory cheesecake," an evolutionary byproduct for human language adaptation.

Hearing

• Hearing involves constructing a model of the world, not just detecting sounds.
• The construction of a model of the world with hearing involves: identifying the sound source, determining the source's location, and understanding the meaning of the sound.

Neuroanatomy of Music

• Outer ear (pinnae and ear canal) amplifies frequencies to locate sounds.
• Middle ear (malleus, incus, stapes) turns airborne into liquid-borne vibrations.
• The inner ear (cochlea) converts liquid-borne vibrations into neural impulses.
• From the cochlea, information travels to the medulla, then to the cortex through 4-5 synapses.
• The medial geniculate nucleus projects information to the primary auditory cortex ("core").
• The core area is surrounded by the secondary auditory cortex.
• Auditory pathways ascend and descend.
• The auditory nerve/cortex have tonotopic organization, mapping frequencies to specific cortex parts.

Music's Cognitive Engagement

• Music engages various brain functions like emotion, memory, learning/plasticity, attention, motor control, pattern perception, and imagery.
• Neuroanatomy of music involves interaction of the Motor Cortex, Auditory Cortex, Visual Cortex, and Cerebellum
• Neuroanatomy of music involves interaction of the Nucleus Accumbens, Hippocampus, Visual cortex, and Cerebellum
• A network of auditory perception, analysis, memory, sensory feedback, movement and emotional reactions to music is involved

Perception and Musical Structure

• Music is characterized by independently variable perceptual attributes like pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, contour, loudness, and spatial location.
• The brain organizes these elements into meter, harmony, and melody.
• Musical and linguistic grammar generate songs/sentences by combining and rearranging elements.

Perception of Music

• Pitch: perception of sound frequency which is present in all cultures
• Pitch organization: divides octaves into musical scales
• Octaves divides into 12 distinct notes
• Pentatonic scales found in every culture

Modular Model of Music Perception

• A model exists that involves acoustic input being parsed into acoustic analyses (pitch, temporal) and then into lexical processing and memory

Music at Birth

• Hearing develops at 4-6 months
• Infants, unlike monkeys, prefer consonance (pleasant music).
• Infants can easily notice contour changes (ups/downs).
• Infants can understand phrase structure in Mozart's music.
• Three-day-old infants distinguish rhythms.
• 1- to 3-day-old newborns were tested using fMRI during exposure to excerpts of Western tonal music. Results point to:
  • Western music elicits right-hemispheric activations in primary/higher-order auditory cortex.
  • Atonal music elicited activations in the left inferior frontal cortex and limbic structures.
  • Infant brains show specialization in processing music early in the first postnatal hours.
  • Neural architecture underlying music processing in newborns is sensitive to tonal key changes, per Perani et al. (2011).

Musical Development

• Newborns perceive and remember pitch sequences, sense beat, sensitivity to contour, and have a preference for consonance.
• From 4-6 years, they respond more to tonal than atonal music.
• At 7 years old, they are sensitive to harmony rules.
• Around 10 years old, they understand finer aspects of key structure.
• At 12 years old, they develop tastes and recognition of styles.

The Mozart Effect

• A myth stated that exposing an unborn baby to Mozart music would lead to a higher IQ
• The Mozart effect refers to claims that people perform better on tests of spatial abilities after listening to music by Mozart, but was shown to not be true.
• Happy music = better mood and better arousal, which leads to better performance on spatial tasks

Congenital Amusia

• Congenital amusia makes music sound like banging pots and pans which is unpleasent.
• It is a lifelong disorder with difficulty perceiving or making sense of music.
• Detecting differences involves identifying change: individuals with amusia require a much greater change to be detected.
• "Tone deafness" affects around 4% of the population.
• People with amusia have normal rhythm perception; aspect of disorder seems variable.

Pitch Perception Problems

• Amusics have trouble telling whether a melody goes up or down.
• This affects the small changes, like semitones, which are used in music.
• Problems with pitch direction are likely to impact on real world music listening
• Case study - the subject was known as - Monica: a documented case of congenital amusia is characterized by the absence of structural brain changes. This disorder refers to a musical disability that cannot be explained by prior brain lesion, hearing loss, cognitive deficits, socio-affective disturbance, or lack of environmental stimulation.
• Monica could detect changing pitch (11 semitones) only if the pitch was rising and not when it was falling. She may not have a working memory problem

Amusia - Behavioural Studies in the Brain

• Amusia is associated with a broader pattern of difficulties beyond tone perception but any difficulties can be boiled down to the pitch
• Hyde et al. (2006) measured white matter density between the right frontal and temporal lobes
• Thinner white matter = weaker brain connection
• Severity of Amusia correlates with thinner white matter
• Amusia involves a reduction in white matter in the right inferior frontal cortex and an increase in auditory cortex gray matter.
• Increases in gray matter in auditory cortex (Peretz et al., 2005).
• Differences in cortical thickness may have compromised the normal development of the right fronto-temporal pathway.

Speech Prosody

• Music/language share common origin, functions, and circuitry.
• Emotion sensitivity in speech prosody comes from capacity to process music.
• Amusics made judgements about emotional expressions of spoken phrases
• Music/language share mechanisms triggering emotional responses and have a common evolutionary link.

Music and Language

• Music and Language share many attributes: auditory based forms of communication, sensory input evolved over time and in coherent manner
• SSIRH (shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis; Patel, 2003) states that Syntax in language and music share a common set of circuits instantiated in frontal brain regions
• Both LIFC (listening to music and speech ) activate different regions; in which music-scr. music is in blue and Speech - scr. speech is in red activate different regions

Music and Language Syntax Overlap

• An overlap exists between music and language in the areas of semantic violations and grammar violations
• Linguistic task – black lines
• Music task – red lines
• When there are violations in speech, N400s are used and when there are violations in music, P600 have similar profiles
• In music, this would be playing consonant and dissonant melodien

Music and Emotions

• Music can elicit psychological (mood) and physiological changes such as - the chills effect (shivers, goose bumps, tingling)
• Music induced emotion (euphoria/chills) recruits reward-motivational circuit: basal forebrain, midbrain, orbitofrontal regions with deactivation in amygdala
• During Chills to instrumental music - there is a Positive correlation, and a Negative correlation involving the amygdala
• Decrease in amygdala activation is the anticipation of the chill
• The amygdala is essential for emotion

Pleasant Music

• Activated areas are important for survival such as N Acc, Orbitofrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area
• Reward system is induced in the brain with pleasant music by dopamine
• Instrumental music, though abstract, activates same brain areas as survival functions

Music and Rythm

• Link exists in every culture between beat and movement like dance due to involuntary movement
• Only humans show uniquely show this behaviour
• Tapping and anticipating to a metronome
• Flexible (tap, clap, double the rate)
• Syncopation
• Auditory (complex tap-visual pattern-flashes of light-info through eyes/hopeless)
• Beat is an essential pattern needed to attack a disease that allows movement in the brain
• A regular beat helps those with Parkinson's disease walk better
• The brain features that are at play involve motor structures, especially at z = 6
• Basal ganglia part of motor circuit: time intervals, control sequences of movement are active
• Vocal learning: learning to produce and imitate complex sound patterns based on what you hear
• Why is this only specific to humans due to vocal learning, and the ability to do vocalisation

Musical Expertise

• Musical experience impacts practice, performance, and skill transfer
• Auditory perception has dynamic processes and relies on cortical/subcortical regions, with both bottom-up and top-down processing
• Practicing causes plastic alterations in brain

How Music Affects Brain

• Skilled musicians are unique in that they start at a young age and spend lots of time on practice
• Musicians versus Non-musicians:
  • Both primary auditory cortex's and superior regions were active: -In musicians, however, the planum temporali in areas that are inferior frontal were also activated
  • To see differences more clearly, one must subtract one image from another- Those images lead to finding differences in Planum Temporale and Dorsolateral Prefronatal Cortex, which are prevalent on the left
• Musicians: Left lateralization; Left posterior temporal gyrus (in/near Wernicke's); Left lateral frontal/Broca's

Conclusion

• Studying music cognition and the brain has a long tradition
• Musical operations involve disparate regions of the brain: all lobes and both cortical and subcortical structures
• Roles of cerebellum (movement) and amygdala (emotion) are becoming appreciated
• Music’s components (pitch, rhythm, timbre, contour) are subserved by distinct neural processing units
• Music shares some circuitry with spoken language but also involves distinct neural circuits

Neuroscience

• Music is neuroscience due to:
  • links of many brain functions: imagery, motor, pattern perception, which can be reduced to melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre
  • complex, reducible and grammar with no words
  • the ability to trigger - learning (changes in beahviour and correlate with changes in brain)