Music is virtually universal in human society: it serves many crucial social, cultural, and emotional purposes, it even has its own place in the brain. Researchers at Dartmouth have mapped the area:
- The study by Petr Janata, Research Assistant Professor at Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and his colleagues is reported in the Dec. 13, 2002, issue of Science. Their results indicate that knowledge about the harmonic relationships of music is maintained in the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, which is centrally located, right behind your forehead. This region is connected to, but different from, the temporal lobe, which is involved in more basic sound processing.
"This region in the front of the brain where we mapped musical activity," says Janata, "is important for a number of functions, like assimilating information that is important to one's self, or mediating interactions between emotional and non-emotional information. Our results provide a stronger foundation for explaining the link between music, emotion and the brain."
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, the researchers asked their eight subjects, who all had some degree of musical experience, to listen to a piece of original music. The eight-minute melody, composed by Jeffrey Birk, Dartmouth class of '02, when he was a student, moves through all 24 major and minor keys. The music was specifically crafted to shift in particular ways between and around the different keys. These relationships between the keys, representative of Western music, create a geometric pattern that is donut shaped, which is called a torus.
....Not only did the researchers find and map the areas in the brain that track melodies, they also found that the exact mapping varies from session to session in each subject. This suggests that the map is maintained as a changing or dynamic topography. In other words, each time the subject hears the melody, the same neural circuit tracks it slightly differently. This dynamic map may be the key to understanding why a piece of music might elicit a certain behavior one time, like dancing, and something different another time, like smiling when remembering a dance.
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