Neuroscience
From tomorrow's New York Times:~ Visit Carl Zimmer’s blog: The Loom
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Anthony H. Risser | neuroscience | neuropsychology | brain
- Hearing Music That Isn't There
You've probably been tormented by a catchy song playing over and over in your head. Spare a thought then for those people for whom this phenomenon is taken to the next level: the song or songs sound real and they play round the clock. They have what's...
- Musical Training Changes Children's Brains
Psychologists have discovered that musical training not only changes the way young children’s brains respond to sounds – it also boosts their memory performance. Takako Fujioka and colleagues looked at how the brains of 12 children aged between 4...
- Compose New Music? In Your Dreams
The source of professional musicians’ creativity could lie in their dreams, report Piero Salzarulo and colleagues at the University of Florence. They asked 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musical students to complete a record of their dreams and...
- Götterdämmerung Halluzination
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Katarina Dalayman as Brünnhilde, in the Metropolitan Opera production of Götterdämmerung. Musical hallucinations have been reported in the psychiatric literature, most often associated with schizophrenia, depression,...
- More From Daniel Levitin
Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist at McGill University and professional musician, has been in the (science) news a lot lately. He just published This is your brain on music : the science of a human obsession, the New York Times wrote about him a few weeks...
Neuroscience
Musical Hallucinations
From tomorrow's New York Times:
Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod[ ... Read the full article ...]
By CARL ZIMMER
The New York Times
Published: July 12, 2005
[snip]
Only a handful of brain scans have been made of people with musical hallucinations. Dr. Tim Griffiths, a neurologist at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England, performed one of these studies on six elderly patients who developed musical hallucinations after becoming partly deaf.
Dr. Griffiths used a scanning technique known as PET, which involves injecting radioactive markers into the bloodstream. Each time he scanned his subjects' brains, he asked them whether they had experienced musical hallucinations. If they had, he asked them to rate the intensity on a scale from one to seven.
Dr. Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became more active as the hallucinations became more intense. "What strikes me is that you see a very similar pattern in normal people who are listening to music," he said.
The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When Dr. Griffith's subjects hallucinated, they used only the parts of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.
These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret, Dr. Griffiths suggested. When no sound is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound. They then try to match these impulses to memories of music, turning a few notes into a familiar melody.
[snip]
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Anthony H. Risser | neuroscience | neuropsychology | brain
- Hearing Music That Isn't There
You've probably been tormented by a catchy song playing over and over in your head. Spare a thought then for those people for whom this phenomenon is taken to the next level: the song or songs sound real and they play round the clock. They have what's...
- Musical Training Changes Children's Brains
Psychologists have discovered that musical training not only changes the way young children’s brains respond to sounds – it also boosts their memory performance. Takako Fujioka and colleagues looked at how the brains of 12 children aged between 4...
- Compose New Music? In Your Dreams
The source of professional musicians’ creativity could lie in their dreams, report Piero Salzarulo and colleagues at the University of Florence. They asked 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musical students to complete a record of their dreams and...
- Götterdämmerung Halluzination
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Katarina Dalayman as Brünnhilde, in the Metropolitan Opera production of Götterdämmerung. Musical hallucinations have been reported in the psychiatric literature, most often associated with schizophrenia, depression,...
- More From Daniel Levitin
Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist at McGill University and professional musician, has been in the (science) news a lot lately. He just published This is your brain on music : the science of a human obsession, the New York Times wrote about him a few weeks...