The music department was found in the brain. Free Technical Library News

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The music department was found in the brain

26.12.2015

We can easily distinguish music from speech or, for example, from the sound of footsteps by ear. But does this mean that there are special areas in our brain tuned specifically to the sounds of music, or does the musical zones actually combine several functions, and music recognition is just one of them? Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argue that the first is true - there are indeed neurons in the auditory cortex dedicated to musical information.

The experiment involved 10 people who listened to a variety of things: music, and speech, and telephone calls, and the noise of a passing car, etc. The listener's brain was scanned in a magnetic resonance groups of cells. The limit of functional MRI is hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons, and if, for example, differences in activity occur in two adjacent cell clusters, each of which has 500 thousand neurons, then fMRI will see this, but if there are 10 thousand, or a thousand cells, then no longer, these zones will merge into one, even if their activity will be very different.

However, this time the researchers managed to find a way out with the help of improved fMRI data processing, which made it possible to distinguish relatively small (tens of thousands) groups of neurons. As a result, six groups of cells were found in the auditory cortex, which were characterized by sound specialization, that is, they predominantly responded to sounds of a certain kind or a certain characteristic of sound. One of the groups turned out to be musical, the other - speech, the rest tracked the general acoustic parameters (height and frequency).

The cerebral cortex responsible for the perception of sounds is very heterogeneous in function, and the authors of the work emphasize that the speech and musical groups of neurons did not intersect with the primary auditory cortex, while the other four found neural clusters just overlapped with it. The primary auditory cortex is the first "instance" to which the signal comes from the receptors in the inner ear. Here, the most common acoustic features are analyzed, the same frequency and pitch, and therefore, obviously, neurons specializing in such parameters are turned on at the first stages of sound information processing.

But to define a sound as speech or music, more complex, abstract work is required. It must be emphasized that here we are talking specifically about the sounds of music and speech, and, for example, there are other sections in the cortex for a meaningful analysis of what was said, just like the emotions that we experience from our favorite song can be seen in special emotional centers. And the musical neural group, which we managed to identify, most likely works in the closest connection with emotional and cognitive centers, so that a specialized response to music arises in it, among other things, as a result of signals that came from other "departments".

In the future, the researchers want to find out if there is an even more detailed specialization in the found group of cells, that is, whether there are neurons of melody, rhythm, etc. But here everything depends on whether it will be possible to further increase the resolution of neurobiological methods.

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