Part of Brain Responds to Music Alone, a New Study Claims

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Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have recently conducted a study which revealed that a specific part of the brain responds to music.

In the past, Independent says the common belief amongst scientists was that the ability to appreciate music was a mere derivative to understanding complex sounds. The results of the new study indicate that not only are there neurons dedicated to detecting and understanding music but making and listening to music may have influenced the development of the human brain.

Health Canal says a total of 10 volunteers were selected and asked to listen to 165 different sounds which include music, people talking and a host of everyday sounds such as a ringing phone and footsteps among others. For this study, the researchers utilized a specialized brain scanner which showed which areas of the brain would light up when sound was detected.

Independent says a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine kept an eye on the blood flow around the brain. The blood flow was used as an indicator to see which sections of the brain were the most active when it came to catching and analyzing sounds.

A total of six populations of neurons were identified. Each population reacted distinctively depending on the type of sound encountered.

Josh McDermott is an assistant professor of neuroscience at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. McDermott said: "We found evidence for a population of neurons in the adult human brain that responds selectively to music."

"The experiments also revealed a separate population that responds selectively to speech." 

According to Sam Norman-Haignere, the lead author of the study, the results indicate that the brain has several levels of processing sound. On the health publication, Norman-Haignere says he and his colleagues believe that the primary stage involves responding to simple aspects of sound while the next stage processes the abstract aspects of speech and music.

As the respondents for the study were adults, whether the same neural response can be detected by infants remains to be seen. "One way to address this would be to test whether comparable responses are present in the brains of young children, but we have not done this yet," says McDermott on the Independent.

Musical perception is not unique to humans. According to a recent report by NPR, in 2001, Peter Gabriel attempted to play with two bonobos with some success.

With some training on how to use keyboards, the apes surprised the musicians by showing a basic awareness to rhythm and melody.