The mechanism by which the "music" that has not been elucidated until now is processed in the brain is revealed

ByChristian Weidinger

Physically looking at the act of "listening to music", it means that the brain senses the electric signal generated by the vibration of the air trembling the eardrum, and the sound is felt, but why human beings " I realized it as "music", and even though I feel comfortable, I did not know much even in the modern era when my brain science was developed. The secret of such a brain is gradually becoming obvious.

New Ways Into the Brain's 'Music Room' - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/science/new-ways-into-the-brains-music-room.html

To the human brainAuditory fieldThere is a region called, there is a mechanism that receives the signal from the ear nerve and perceives it as "sound". However, in order to acknowledge the sound of a drum, the sound of a flute, and the "music" played by these instruments, unlike "sound" such as striking a hand, things falling on the ground and water flowing, It is thought that the brain has another mechanism.

It was the research team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that first clarified the situation. Professor Nancy Kanwisher, Professor Josh H. McDermott, and doctoral researcher Sam Norman-Haignere et al. Analyzed the movement of the brain with a different approach from the past and revealed how the brain perceives "music" Did.

The research team is working on the latest equipment for visualizing the movement of blood in the brainFMRI"Three-dimensionally measure the activity of the brain. From the result, in human brains, apart from those which deal with "talking spirit" which was conventionally clarified,It has a music-specific nerve routeWe are clarifying that.

ByIan Line

Further noteworthy is that it is a mechanism of processing path of music and speech. In the auditory cortex in the human brain, areas for processing speech and music are divided, showing unresponsive movements against conflicting inputs, respectively. But when a song with lyrics comes into your ears it means that you begin processing so that those areas overlap.

In the study, it is said that the part of the brain that senses music is measured by letting the subject listen to 165 sounds and music, and stereoscopically visualizing the reaction of the brain using fMRI at that time. On the following page, you can listen to samples of the sound source used at that time, but the sound source on the top of the two are excerpts from the actually used sound source, and the sound source below is the brain It has become a collection of sound sources that activated the nervous group of. It is interesting in particular that the sound sources below are very "musical" ones.

Stimuli


Georgetown UniversityLaboratory of Integrative Neuroscience and CognitionDr. Josef Rauschecker of the Institute for Integrated Neuroscience and Cognitive Science highly appreciates the research results, and the function that the human brain recognizes music "The theory that music is older than conversation and language There are some researchers who say that words are born of music evolution, "he says about the meaning of research results with the process leading from music to language.

According to Dr. Rauschecker, when comparing music and language, although words are more important for human beings to survive as seeds, words are better, but music has the power to connect groups. "The act of making music with other people in the tribe is an act that humans have done since long ago."

ByJimmy Baikovicius

When listening to music, sometimes it is an illusion that musicians are playing as if they are playing in front of us, but thinking carefully, music is just a vibration of air, It can be said that it is one of advanced processing capacities hidden in the brain that making a pseudo image by interpreting it in. If you think so, it seems that you will be strangely wondering how the brain of the human being moves with what mechanism.

For the paper published by the research team, it is possible to confirm the summary or purchase the full text at the following link.

Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition: Neuron