Posts tagged music
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
A developmental study of the effect of music training on timed movements
When people clap to music, sing, play a musical instrument, or dance, they engage in temporal entrainment. We examined the effect of music training on the precision of temporal entrainment in 57 children aged 10–14 years (31 musicians, 26 non-musicians). Performance was examined for two tasks: self-paced finger tapping (discrete movements) and circle drawing (continuous movements). For each task, participants synchronized their movements with a steady pacing signal and then continued the movement at the same rate in the absence of the pacing signal. Analysis of movements during the continuation phase revealed that musicians were more accurate than non-musicians at finger tapping and, to a lesser extent, circle drawing. Performance on the finger-tapping task was positively associated with the number of years of formal music training, whereas performance on the circle-drawing task was positively associated with the age of participants. These results indicate that music training and maturation of the motor system reinforce distinct skills of timed movement.
Musical Training Offsets Some Academic Achievement Gaps
Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing can help disadvantaged children strengthen their reading and language skills, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 122nd Annual Convention.
The findings, which involved hundreds of kids participating in musical training programs in Chicago and Los Angeles public schools, highlight the role learning music can have on the brains of youth in impoverished areas, according to presenter Nina Kraus, PhD, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University.
“Research has shown that there are differences in the brains of children raised in impoverished environments that affect their ability to learn,” said Kraus. “While more affluent students do better in school than children from lower income backgrounds, we are finding that musical training can alter the nervous system to create a better learner and help offset this academic gap.” Up until now, research on the impact of musical training has been primarily conducted on middle- to upper-income music students participating in private music lessons, she said.
Kraus’s lab research has concluded that musical training appears to enhance the way children’s nervous systems process sounds in a busy environment, such as a classroom or a playground. This improved neural function may lead to enhanced memory and attention spans which, in turn, allow kids to focus better in the classroom and improve their communication skills, she said.
Many of Kraus’s study participants are part of the Harmony Project in Los Angeles, which was founded by fellow presenter Margaret Martin, DrPH. In her most recent research, Kraus studied children beginning when they were in first and second grade. Half participated in musical training and the other half were randomly selected from the program’s lengthy waiting list and received no musical training during the first year of the study. Children who had no musical training had diminished reading scores while Harmony Project participants’ reading scores remained unchanged over the same time span.
Kraus’s lab also found that, after two years, neural responses to sound in adolescent music students were faster and more precise than in students in another type of enrichment class. The researchers tested the auditory abilities in adolescents from lower economic backgrounds at three public high schools in Chicago. Over two years, half of the students participated in either band or choir during each school day while the other half were enrolled in Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps classes, which teaches character education, achievement, wellness, leadership and diversity. All participants had comparable reading ability and IQs at the start of the study. The researchers recorded the children’s brain waves as they listened to a repeated syllable against soft background sound, which made it harder for the brain to process. The researchers repeated measures after one year and again at the two-year mark. They found music students’ neural responses had strengthened while the JROTC students’ responses had remained the same. Interestingly, the differences in the music students’ brain waves in response to sounds as described above occurred after two years but not at one year, which showed that these programs cannot be used as quick fixes, Kraus said. This is the strongest evidence to date that public school music education in lower-income students can lead to better sound processing in the brain when compared to other types of enrichment education, she added.
Even after the lessons stop, the brain still reaps benefits, according to studies on the long-term benefits of music lessons. In one study, Kraus’s team surveyed college students and asked them how many years they had music training. As they found with the elementary school students, college students who had more than five years of musical training in elementary school or high school had improved neural responses to sound when compared to college students who had had no musical training.
The Harmony Project provides instruments for the students who participate five or more hours a week in musical instruction and ensemble rehearsals. The project is year-round and tuition-free based on income, said Martin. Many of the programs build full-time bands in neighborhoods where the students live and the students agree to commit to the program from elementary school through high school, she said.
“We’re spending millions of dollars on drugs to help kids focus and here we have a non-pharmacologic intervention that thousands of disadvantaged kids devote themselves to in their non-school hours — that works,” Martin said. “Learning to make music appears to remodel our kids’ brains in ways that facilitates and improves their ability to learn.”
The Harmony Project has launched programs in other urban school districts, including Miami, New Orleans, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kansas City, Missouri and Ventura, California.
(Image: Shutterstock)
Hippocampal activity during music listening exposes the memory-boosting power of music
For the first time the hippocampus—a brain structure crucial for creating long-lasting memories—has been observed to be active in response to recurring musical phrases while listening to music. Thus, the hippocampal involvement in long-term memory may be less specific than previously thought, indicating that short and long-term memory processes may depend on each other after all.
The study was conducted at the University of Jyväskylä and the AMI Center of Aalto University, by a group of researchers led by Academy Professor Petri Toiviainen, the Finnish Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research (CIMR) at the University of Jyväskylä, and Dr. Elvira Brattico, Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. Results of the study were published in Cortex, a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behaviour.
“Our study basically shows an increase of activity in the medial temporal lobe areas—best known for being essential for long term memory—when musical motifs in the piece were repeated. This means that the lobe areas are engaged in the short-term recognition of musical phrases,” explains Iballa Burunat, the leading author of the study. Dr. Brattico adds: “Importantly, this hadn’t been observed before in music neuroscience.”
A fundamental highlight of the study is the use of a setting that is more natural than those traditionally employed in neuroscience: the participants’ only task was to attentively listen to an Argentinian tango from beginning to end. This kind of music provides well-defined, salient musical motifs that are easy to follow. They can be used to study recognition processes in the brain without having to resort to sound created in a lab. By using this more realistic approach, the researchers were able to identify brain areas involved in motif tracking without having to rely on the participants’ ability to self-report, which would have constrained the study of brain processes.
“We think that our novel method allowed us to uncover this phenomenon. In other words, the identified areas may also be related to the formation of a more permanent memory trace of a musical piece, enabled precisely by the very use of a real-life stimulus (the recording of a live performance) in a realistic situation where participants just listen to the music as their brain responses are recorded,” Iballa Burunat goes on to explain. Listening to the music from beginning to end may have imprinted the participants with a long lasting memory of the tune. This might not be expected were the participants exposed to a simpler stimulus in controlled conditions, as is the case in most studies in music and memory.
Although a real-life setting may be sufficient to trigger the involvement of the hippocampus, another explanation could lie in music’s capacity to elicit emotions. “We cannot ignore music’s emotional power which is thought to be crucial for the mnemonic power of music as to how and what we remember. There is evidence on the robust integration of music, memory and emotion—take for instance autobiographical memories. So it wouldn’t be surprising that the emotional content of the music may well have been a factor in triggering these limbic responses,” she continues. This makes sense, since the chosen musical piece by Astor Piazzolla was a tribute to his father after his sudden death, and so the main purpose of the piece was to be of a deeply emotional nature”. Certainly, the hippocampus—as part of the limbic system—is connected to neural circuitry involved in emotional behavior, and ongoing research suggests that emotional events seem to be more memorable than neutral ones. The authors emphasize that these results should motivate similar approaches to study verbal or visual short term memory by tracking the themes or repetitive structures of a given stimulus. Moreover, the study has implications for neurodegenerative diseases associated with hippocampal atrophy, like Alzheimer’s. “Music may positively affect patients if used wisely to stimulate their hippocampi, and thus their memory system,” Academy Professor Petri Toiviainen indicates. A better understanding of the link between music and memory could have widespread repercussions, leading to novel interventions to rehabilitate or improve the life quality of patients with neurodegenerative conditions.
Keeping to the beat is no mean feat: Scientists reveal how two tracks of music become one
How does a DJ mix two songs to make the beat seem common to both tracks? A successful DJ makes the transition between tracks appear seamless while a bad mix is instantly noticeable and results in a ‘galloping horses’ effect that disrupts the dancing of the crowd. How accurate does beat mixing need to be to enhance, rather than disrupt perceived rhythm?
In a study published today (Wednesday 21 May 2014) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists from the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge present a new model that predicts whether or not two tracks will seem to share a common beat. This model also promises to help us understand how groups of people often start moving in synchrony, for example, football fans bouncing up and down at a stadium, or crowds falling into step when walking over a bridge.
‘We found that the time window in which two beat lines are heard as one isn’t fixed - it changes according to the statistical properties of each beat line, including how consistent or predictable they are,’ said Dr Mark Elliott, lead researcher on the study from the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology. ‘For example, with two very consistent beat lines we only allow a very small time difference between them before we consider them to be separate. By analogy, given that DJs tend to play songs with a strong bass beat, they need to be very accurate in aligning the beats of the two songs if they are to be heard as one so as not to disrupt the flow of dancing. Our model and experiments reveal the timing properties of separate beat lines that determine whether they will be heard as one or two.’
Dr Elliott and his colleagues tested their model using a laboratory task that involved people tapping their fingers in time with two similar beat lines played simultaneously, one defined by high pitched tones, the other low pitched tones. The concurrency of the lines was varied such that the high and low pitched tones were played close together in time or far apart. Furthermore, the separation between the high-low tones was either consistent or randomly varied across the experiment. The researchers determined when people change from tapping along to a single beat formed from the two tones or targeted one of the tones while ignoring the other. They found that the time separation between tones that was required for people to judge them as distinct beats varied according to the consistency of the timings between the tones. Subsequently, these judgments influenced the timing of their movements.
Dr Elliott added, ‘People develop an expectation of when in time the next beat will occur. In defining the beat, they use the separation and consistency of the beat lines to determine whether the two tones should be combined together or whether just one tone should be attended to and the other ignored. Our model was able to predict the timing of participants’ movements based on the timing statistics of the tones we presented. Therefore, it not only allows us to calculate whether two beats will be heard as one, but also means we can predict the subtle effects the perception of an underlying rhythm can have on the movements people make to keep in synchrony with more complex beats.’
Dr Elliott is currently involved in a study, in collaboration with the University of Leeds, investigating the timing accuracy of movements in professional DJs compared to classical musicians and non-musicians. In addition, the findings of the current research are being applied to other areas: ‘We are currently investigating how spontaneous synchronisation of movements occurs within crowds. For example, in football stadiums the crowd sometimes starts to bounce up and down together. When the crowd moves together like this, it can create problems with structural vibration. Working with vibration engineers from the Universities of Sheffield and Exeter, we are applying our models to understand how such crowd dynamics might arise from the way each person adjusts their timing in relation to timing information from the people around them.’
(Source: birmingham.ac.uk)
Music can be soothing or stirring, it can make us dance or make us sad. Blood pressure, heartbeat, respiration and even body temperature – music affects the body in a variety of ways. It triggers especially powerful physical reactions in pregnant women. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have discovered that pregnant women compared to their non-pregnant counterparts rate music as more intensely pleasant and unpleasant, associated with greater changes in blood pressure. Music appears to have an especially strong influence on pregnant women, a fact that may relate to a prenatal conditioning of the fetus to music.
For their study, the Max Planck researchers played short musical sequences of 10 or 30 seconds’ duration to female volunteers. They changed the passages and played them backwards or incorporated dissonances. By doing so, they distorted the originally lively instrumental pieces and made listening to them less pleasant.
The pregnant women rated the pieces of music slightly differently, they perceived the pleasant music as more pleasant and the unpleasant as more unpleasant. The blood pressure response to music was much stronger in the pregnant group. Forward-dissonant music produced a particularly pronounced fall in blood pressure, whereas backwards-dissonant music led to a higher blood pressure after 10 seconds and a lower one after 30 seconds. “Thus, unpleasant music does not cause an across-the-board increase in blood pressure, unlike some other stress factors”, says Tom Fritz of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. “Instead, the body’s response is just as dynamic as the music itself.”
According to the results, music is a very special stimulus for pregnant women, to which they react strongly. “Every acoustic manipulation of music affects blood pressure in pregnant women far more intensely than in non-pregnant women”, says Fritz. Why music has such a strong physiological influence on pregnant woman is still unknown. Originally, the scientists suspected the hormone oestrogen to play a mayor part in this process, because it has an influence on the brain’s reward system, which is responsible for the pleasant sensations experienced while listening to music. However, non-pregnant women showed constant physiological responses throughout the contraceptive cycle, which made them subject to fluctuations in oestrogen levels. “Either oestrogen levels are generally too low in non-pregnant women, or other physiological changes during pregnancy are responsible for this effect”, explains Fritz.
The researchers suspect that foetuses are conditioned to music perception while still in the womb by the observed intense physiological music responses of the mothers. From 28 weeks, i.e. at the start of the third trimester of pregnancy, the heart rate of the foetus already changes when it hears a familiar song. From 35 weeks, there is even a change in its movement patterns.
Musical training increases blood flow in the brain
Research by the University of Liverpool has found that brief musical training can increase the blood flow in the left hemisphere of our brain. This suggests that the areas responsible for music and language share common brain pathways.
Researchers from the University’s Institute of Psychology, Health and Society carried out two separate studies which looked at brain activity patterns in musicians and non-musicians.
The first study looking for patterns of brain activity of 14 musicians and 9 non-musicians whilst they participated in music and word generation tasks. The results showed that patterns in the musician’s brains were similar in both tasks but this was not the case for the non-musicians.
In the second study, brain activity patterns were measured in a different group of non-musical participants who took part in a word generation task and a music perception task.
The measurements were also taken again following half an hour’s musical training. The measurements of brain activity taken before the musical training* showed no significant pattern of correlation. However, following the training significant similarities were found.
Amy Spray, who conducted the research as part of a School of Psychology Summer Internship Scheme, said: “The areas of our brain that process music and language are thought to be shared and previous research has suggested that musical training can lead to the increased use of the left hemisphere of the brain.
This study looked into the modulatory effects that musical training could have on the use of the different sides of the brain when performing music and language tasks.”
Amy added: “It was fascinating to see that the similarities in blood flow signatures could be brought about after just half an hour of simple musical training.”
Liverpool Psychologist, Dr Georg Mayer, explained: “This suggests that the correlated brain patterns were the result of using areas thought to be involved in language processing. Therefore we can assume that musical training results in a rapid change in the cognitive mechansims utilised for music perception and these shared mechanisms are usually employed for language.”
How the brain recognizes familiar music
Research from McGill University reveals that the brain’s motor network helps people remember and recognize music that they have performed in the past better than music they have only heard. A recent study by Prof. Caroline Palmer of the Department of Psychology sheds new light on how humans perceive and produce sounds, and may pave the way for investigations into whether motor learning could improve or protect memory or cognitive impairment in aging populations. The research is published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
“The memory benefit that comes from performing a melody rather than just listening to it, or saying a word out loud rather than just hearing or reading it, is known as the ’production effect’ on memory”, says Prof. Palmer, a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Performance. “Scientists have debated whether the production effect is due to motor memories, such as knowing the feel of a particular sequence of finger movements on piano keys, or simply due to strengthened auditory memories, such as knowing how the melody tones should sound. Our paper provides new evidence that motor memories play a role in improving listeners’ recognition of tones they have previously performed.”
For the study, researchers recruited twenty skilled pianists from Lyon, France. The group was asked to learn simple melodies by either hearing them several times or performing them several times on a piano. Pianists then heard all of the melodies they had learned, some of which contained wrong notes, while their brain electric signals were measured using electroencephalography (EEG).
“We found that pianists were better at recognizing pitch changes in melodies they had performed earlier,” said the study’s first author, Brian Mathias, a McGill PhD student who conducted the work at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre in France with additional collaborators Drs. Barbara Tillmann and Fabien Perrin.
The team found that EEG measurements revealed larger changes in brain waves and increased motor activity for previously performed melodies than for heard melodies about 200 milliseconds after the wrong notes. This reveals that the brain quickly compares incoming auditory information with motor information stored in memory, allowing us to recognize whether a sound is familiar.
“This paper helps us understand ‘experiential learning’, or ‘learning by doing’, and offers pedagogical and clinical implications,” said Mathias, “The role of the motor system in recognizing music, and perhaps also speech, could inform education theory by providing strategies for memory enhancement for students and teachers.”
(Source: mcgill.ca)
The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics - those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.
The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of “trading fours,” a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other’s musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.
The results of the study suggest that the brain regions that process syntax aren’t limited to spoken language, according to Charles Limb, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Rather, he says, the brain uses the syntactic areas to process communication in general, whether through language or through music.
Limb, who is himself a musician and holds a faculty appointment at the Peabody Conservatory, says the work sheds important new light on the complex relationship between music and language.
"Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language," says Limb, the senior author of a report on the work that appears online Feb. 19 in the journal PLOS ONE. “But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language.
"We’ve shown in this study that there is a fundamental difference between how meaning is processed by the brain for music and language. Specifically, it’s syntactic and not semantic processing that is key to this type of musical communication. Meanwhile, conventional notions of semantics may not apply to musical processing by the brain."
To study the response of the brain to improvisational musical conversation between musicians, the Johns Hopkins researchers recruited 11 men aged 25 to 56 who were highly proficient in jazz piano performance. During each 10-minute session of trading fours, one musician lay on his back inside the MRI machine with a plastic piano keyboard resting on his lap while his legs were elevated with a cushion. A pair of mirrors was placed so the musician could look directly up while in the MRI machine and see the placement of his fingers on the keyboard. The keyboard was specially constructed so it did not have metal parts that would be attracted to the large magnet in the fMRI.
The improvisation between the musicians activated areas of the brain linked to syntactic processing for language, called the inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus. In contrast, the musical exchange deactivated brain structures involved in semantic processing, called the angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus.
"When two jazz musicians seem lost in thought while trading fours, they aren’t simply waiting for their turn to play," Limb says. "Instead, they are using the syntactic areas of their brain to process what they are hearing so they can respond by playing a new series of notes that hasn’t previously been composed or practiced."
Mathematical beauty activates same brain region as great art or music
People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty.
There are many different sources of beauty - a beautiful face, a picturesque landscape, a great symphony are all examples of beauty derived from sensory experiences. But there are other, highly intellectual sources of beauty. Mathematicians often describe mathematical formulae in emotive terms and the experience of mathematical beauty has often been compared by them to the experience of beauty derived from the greatest art.
In a new paper published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain activity of 15 mathematicians when they viewed mathematical formulae that they had previously rated as beautiful, neutral or ugly.
The results showed that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain – namely the medial orbito-frontal cortex – as the experience of beauty derived from art or music.
Professor Semir Zeki, lead author of the paper from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, said: “To many of us mathematical formulae appear dry and inaccessible but to a mathematician an equation can embody the quintescence of beauty. The beauty of a formula may result from simplicity, symmetry, elegance or the expression of an immutable truth. For Plato, the abstract quality of mathematics expressed the ultimate pinnacle of beauty.”
“This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such as highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.”
In the study, each subject was given 60 mathematical formulae to review at leisure and rate on a scale of -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) according to how beautiful they experienced them to be. Two weeks later they were asked to re-rate them while in an fMRI scanner.
The formulae most consistently rated as beautiful (both before and during the scans) were Leonhard Euler’s identity, the Pythagorean identity and the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Leonhard Euler’s identity links five fundamental mathematical constants with three basic arithmetic operations each occurring once and the beauty of this equation has been likened to that of the soliloquy in Hamlet.
Mathematicians judged Srinivasa Ramanujan’s infinite series and Riemann’s functional equation as the ugliest.
Professor Zeki said: “We have found that activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to – even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified.”
Professor Zeki added: “We have found that, as with the experience of visual or musical beauty, the activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to be – even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, one which has been debated since classical times, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified.”
The iPod in the head: How the brain processes musical hallucinations
A woman with an “iPod in her head” has helped scientists at Newcastle University and University College London identify the areas of the brain that are affected when patients experience a rare condition called musical hallucinations.
Sufferers persistently perceive music, as if they were hearing it with their ears, when no music is actually being played. Initially they often mistake the experience for actual music playing and while musical hallucinations can occasionally be a symptom of a neurological or psychiatric disorder, it is usually caused by hearing loss in people who are in normal physical and mental health.
Dr Sukhbinder Kumar from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, lead author of the paper published in Cortex said: “We found that a network of brain areas, that are usually involved in processing of melodies and retrieval of memory of music, were particularly active during hallucinations of music in the absence of any sound or music being played externally.”
Nearly one in ten people suffer from tinnitus which is technically an auditory hallucination, in which tones or buzzing noises are heard following hearing loss. However in a small number of people with hearing loss these hallucinations take the form of music, but until now the brain mechanisms underlying this process were poorly understood.
This study by researchers at Newcastle University and University College London and funded by the Wellcome Trust has looked in depth at one sufferer of the condition and pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in producing the hallucinations. These findings could lead to a better understanding of the condition and possibly treatments in the future.
Musical hallucination
Sylvia, 69, a maths teacher who is also a musician with perfect pitch, started to go deaf about 20 years ago after a viral infection. Then about eleven years later she experienced a sudden acute hearing loss and severe tinnitus and her musical hallucinations developed after this. Due to her musical knowledge Sylvia was able to notate what she was hearing.
Initially the condition was irritating and affected Sylvia’s sleep, but she learnt to live with it. “I did everything I could to get rid of them but they persisted, always in a minor key and therefore a bit depressing,” she said.
“Eventually the number of notes increased until they seemed to be parts of tunes. One day I recognized something and, once I had done so, more and more phrases from classical music appeared in my brain.”
Among the pieces of music that Sylvia was hearing in her hallucinations was Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, as well as music by Bach. Amazingly Sylvia found that by playing music herself, she was able to alter the music in her hallucinations.
“I can change the hallucination playing in my head to the music I am practising. This is particularly the case with the music of Bach - the hallucination will pause and then a whole page will start to play in my head, gradually curtailing itself until just a phrase remains and is repeated. That might then repeat a thousand times a day. It is as if I have my own internal ipod.”
Sylvia’s experience is fairly typical, though the condition occurs just as often in non-musicians, and sometimes starts abruptly rather than slowly developing as in her case.
How we hear
As Sylvia’s hallucinations could be manipulated by playing an external piece of music that allowed the researchers to understand what was happening in her brain during hallucinations. They first identified pieces of music that suppressed her hallucinations and these pieces were then played to her while her brain activity was being monitored using magnetoencephalography MEG), which measures magnetic fields around the scalp as the brain processes information.
During normal perception of music what we actually ‘hear’ is a complex interplay of the sound entering the ear and our brain’s interpretations and predictions. Normally the strength and quality of the input from the ear is so high that it dominates what we actually perceive however the brain fills in the gaps when the ears do not provide enough input.
“With hearing loss, as in Sylvia’s case, the signal from the ear becomes weak and noisy, like a poorly-tuned radio. The brain’s predictive mechanisms therefore have to work very hard to make sense of what we are hearing. What we have found is that these processes sometimes end up running away with themselves to cause hallucinations,” said author Dr William Sedley also of Newcastle University.
Dr Kumar added: “This also explains why listening to an external piece of music suppresses hallucinations. When external music is playing the signal entering her brain is much stronger and more reliable, which constrains the aberrant communication going on in the brain areas during hallucinations.”
This new understanding of musical hallucinations may provide better treatment in the future as Newcastle University’s Professor Tim Griffiths, professor of Cognitive Neurology who lead the study explained: “It might be possible to disrupt the abnormal communication between the brain areas using brain stimulation, or to use pharmacological treatments to disrupt chemical transmitters that drive communication between them.
“Better hearing aids also appear to help suppress hallucinations, so we would advise people experiencing musical hallucinations to seek medical attention, if for nothing more than to ensure they have the best available hearing aids.”
Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, says: “This case is extremely fascinating, but the condition is relatively rare. However, it is unusual cases such as this that can give us profound insights into how the brain works and, one hopes, lead to potential new treatments to improve the patient’s life.”