What’s the Relationship between The Music and the Brain?
The topic of this video is the Music and the Brain. Aniruddh Patel, of the Neurosciences Institute, discusses what music can teach us about the brain, and what brain science, in turn, can reveal about music. It is a very interesting video rich in information on how does music affects the brain. I always wondered what would be the relation of the human brain and the music. Watching this video some of my inquiries were answered.
This presentation is a part of a series called “Grey Matters” and is organized from Neurosciences Institute and University of California Television. There are many other interesting talks on the human mind and brain, but I haven’t found the time yet to watch them all. Due to the fact that these presentations are long, over 50 minutes, I will present only those which I was able to watch them fully without getting bored. So let’s continue to what you are going to see about the music and the brain.
This talk is divided into two major parts. In the first one Dr. Patel talks about what music can teach us about the brain and in the second part what we can learn about the brain studying the music effects.
The music and the brain is a very old interest. One philosopher who interested about the effects of music on people was Plato. In fact music is a lot older than philosophy. A.Patel shows us a flute which it is aged 35.000 years old. This indicates that humans are a musical species and according the presentation, maybe humans are the only musical species. This has to do with some specific areas of the human brain.
Is has been observed that music engages many brain functions, such as:
o Emotion
o Memory
o Learning and plasticity
o Attention
o Motor control
o Pattern reception
o Imagery
o And more…
Music, Language and the Brain
There are two brain anomalies which can reveal some sort of relationship between language and music. These are “Aphasia” and “Amusia”. Aphasia indicates a language problem. An aphasic cannot understand words and cannot use words together in order to form meaningful sentences. Amusia is a disorder, less common than Aphasia with similar effects on music, which is the loss of musical abilities followed by brain damage.
Well, these two disorders can reveal if there is a connection between language and music. This is the main concept of this presentation. There is a hypothesis that music and language uses the same neural circuits. And this assumption results from the fact that most people we understand when something is wrong in the music we hear as well as in the language we use. So there must be rules in music as there is grammar in language.
So the cases that have to be studied are the following:
o Aphasia without Amusia
o Amusia without Aphasia
Aniruddh Patel makes the research on these two cases and presents the results.
Have you ever wondered why parrots dance to the music? In this video this is also explained.
The presentation ends with the promises of music neuroscience. These are some elements which can reveal us many mysteries of the human mind. Music engages many brain functions, has grammar and rules and also it can be broken and studied into smaller parts.
Honestly there is too much information in this video about the music and the brain which I cannot represent here. If you are interested in this topic then this presentation is a must see.
Here is your Video. Enjoy!
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