The Consistent Way Music of DIfferent Genres Impacts the Mind.

The fifth in a series

PAN

Among other things, PAN was the patron god of the shepherds and anyone else who took delight in a free-spirited way of life. Pan ruled over the earth’s mountains and woodland areas, and was affiliated with all types of rustic music.

Perhaps that’s why PAN came to mind the other night at the Great Lawn in New York City’s Central Park as the NY Philharmonic started to play. It was pure bliss as the orchestra performed Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto” and Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” on a warm spring night.

Imagine the same feeling you may have experienced attending a concert by your favorite orchestra – there might be an unexplained emotion building as you start to transcend reality. This is the result of your mind processing music, when a decidedly physiological effect can begin to take hold.  

John Blacking

Your mind’s ability to take in the music and make sense of it, has been referred to as “humanly organized sound” by John Blacking, a twentieth century ethnomusicologist and author a highly influential book “How Musical is Man?” published in 1977.

In the book, Blacking argued "it is the activities of man the music maker that are of more interest and consequence to humanity than the particular musical achievements of Western man", and that "no musical style has 'its own terms.' The terms are the terms of its society and culture."

But questions still remain – why and how does music make us feel the way we do? Do we each experience music in the same way, or differently?

The plain fact is that different people like different kinds of music. Some are delighted by classical music while others can’t stand it. Despite personal differences, research has shown that music in general has a consistent effect on people’s brains.

“Despite our idiosyncrasies in listening, the brain experiences music in a very consistent fashion across subjects,” according to Daniel Abrams, co-author of a study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“We spend a lot of time listening to music – often in groups, and often in conjunction with synchronized movement and dance said Vinod Menon, PhD. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study’s senior author.

Menon continued “Here, we’ve shown for the first time that despite our individual differences in musical experiences and preferences, classical music elicits a highly consistent pattern of activity across individuals in several brain structures including those involved in movement planning, memory and attention.”

“The notion that healthy subjects respond to complex sounds in the same way” Menon said “could provide novel insights into how individuals with language and speech disorders might listen to and track information differently from the rest of us.”

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table there's a level on which they share a common experience.

fMRI scan of the cognitive activity impact of music.

Brain regions involved in movement, attention, planning and memory consistently showed activation when participants listened to music based on the findings of the study -- these are structures that don't have to do with auditory processing itself. “This means that when we experience music, a lot of other things are going on beyond merely processing sound” Abrams said.

One resulting theory is that these brain areas are involved in holding particular parts of a song, such as the melody, in the mind while the rest of the piece of music plays on, Abrams said. “The results also reflect the power of music to unite people” Levitin added.

Too bad these studies were not available to give PAN some ammunition for his efforts to seduce the nymphs. He might have been able to make a better case based on intellect not just animal instinct.

Anticipation: The Marriage of Music and the Mind

The Fourth in a Series

Pan & the metamorphosis of Pitys.

If anyone was an expert on anticipation it had to be PAN. While he was a lover of the nymphs, they are reported to have often fled from his advances. Could it have been his off-putting half-man, half-goat appearance?

The nymph Pitys was one object of PAN’s desires. She fled to escape his advances and was then transformed into a fir tree. After this episode PAN was reported to have said “Here on the sacred pine tree shall I hang my tuneful pipe.” Not exactly the outcome he had been hoping for. 

Back in the early 1970s singer-songwriter Carly Simon released her second studio album “Anticipation” and its title track, reportedly written in 15 minutes, relates to Simon’s state of mind as she waited to go on a date with Cat Stevens. Luckily, the date must have been a success as Carly’s fate most certainly was not that of Pitys!

The song was written with a formula using verses followed by a refrain:

We can never know about the days to come.

But we think about them anyway, yay.

And I wonder if I’m really with you now.

Or just chasing after some some finer day.

Anticipation, anticipation.

Is making me late.

Is keeping me waiting.

The hit song broke convention because the refrain is not repeated after the last stanza:

And tomorrow we might be together.

I’m no prophet and I don’t know nature’s way,

so I’ll try and see into your eyes right now.

And stay right here because these are the good old days.

So what makes for memorable and enjoyable music, at least from the standpoint of the way that we as humans process the music? Neuroscience is starting to provide some answers. 

The New York TImes reported when pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamines.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.

Daniel Levitin

As Daniel Levitin (right) puts it in his best-selling book 'This is Your Brain on Music' - "Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brains impose structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music."

Wired UK noted last year that listening to music evokes an intangible emotional reaction, but the neural basis of this reaction is complicated. Pitch, melody, rhythm and other components of music are all processed by various areas of the brain, and how it all fits together has (so far) remained mysterious.

IS THERE ONE PLACE IN THE BRAIN WHERE MUSIC IS PROCESSED?

Despite attempts to locate a 'music processor' in the brain, no one neural population -- an 'ensemble' of nervous system cells -- has been identified that could respond selectively to music as opposed to speech or other noises.

Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds.

“It has been the subject of widespread speculation,” says Josh McDermott, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

McDermott continued “One of the core debates surrounding music is to what extent it has dedicated mechanisms in the brain and to what extent it piggybacks off of mechanisms that primarily serve other functions.”

The MIT study used a new method designed to identify neural populations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Using this method, the researchers identified six neural populations with different functions, including the music-selective population and another set of neurons that responds selectively to speech.

THE ROLE OF MUSIC AND HUMAN EVOLUTION 

What is clear is that music – pitches separated by normalized intervals occurring according to recognizable intervals in time – rests on a feature of the brain with which we are born. This suggests an evolutionary value to music, perhaps beyond holding together the social order of a small tribe for survival.

It would not be surprising if we discovered over time that music, broadly construed, is fundamental to mating, child-raising, the propagation of moral and cultural codes, our political order, our sense of beauty, and at some level our language.

Take away our capacity for discriminating rhythms and note intervals, and we may be close to being crustaceans again.

BACK TO THE ANTICIPATION

It starts with auditory cortex – the part of the temporal lobe that processes auditory information in humans and other vertebrates - where musical information is likely being processed. This region of the brain can be active when we imagine a tune.

This area of the brain can encode the abstract relationships between sounds – for instance the particular sound pattern that makes a major cord, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a cord progression. It’s something like when you hear a musician play a wrong note – which can be easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music.

As the NY Times observed “These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard.”

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these predictive mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better, akin to Carly Simon’s recording of “Anticipation” or even Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor.