4- why does music move us
Researchers are only now beginning to unlock the secrets of the brain. It seems like every month some new study or another comes along to explain why we get addicted to nicotine or how our neural pathways were changed because we studied piano as children.
Isolating which part of the brain is responsible for moving your big toe is a neat trick. But what about "softer" functions like figuring out how judgment is formed or music is made? "Why Music Moves Us: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music," a conference at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle in 2005, tried to ask some hindamental questions about how the brain "hears" and translates sound into music.
We know how the ear catches sound and how the sound waves are translated by about 30,000 auditory nerves into electrical and chemical signals that are transmitted to the brain. But how is it that the neurons in the brain translate those signals into something we recognize as music? Scans show that the brain is much more actively engaged with music than with speech. But there is no actual physical sound in your brain. No notes. No music. Only neurons.
"The idea of pitch is a mental phenomenon." says Robert Zatorre, professor of neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. Only the way sounds are organized makes them interesting. Brain scans show that different parts of the brain register activity depending on the kind of music Played. Dissonance, for example, is generally perceived as unpleasant, and it provokes reactions in a different region of the brain than consonant harmonies do.
Music is a basic human condition. We are born primed to pick up on beat regularities and able to put sound in some sort of coherent order. All cultures have music, and the ability to recognize music comes before speech. The brain is wired with reward and avoidance circuitry, and music rates high in the reward region.
There is strong evidence that our attraction to music isn't just for enjoyment. Music helps build community. Think, for example, of how nations and institutions use songs to bring people together, the thrill of singing your national anthem or the "old school song." Music can also aid healing. Patients who have suffered strokes or other brain injuries often show dramatic improvement in their recovery if music or rhythm is played during therapy, reported Michael Thaut, professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University.
Our understanding of how the brain perceives music is still rudimentary, and researchers haven't even developed reliable tests to measure what we want to know about some of the most basic brain functions. Trying to measure, for example, if the brain has a different electrical reaction to music it likes than to music it doesn't is quite difficult because "like" and "dislike" are subjective terms that are hard to quantify scientifically.
Still, it's clear that our perceptions of the world have a physical foundation in the brain, and those perceptions can be altered. Studies have shown, for example, that the recognition of pitch can be altered by as much as one and a half tones with medication.
Mark Tramo, director of the Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard Medical School, told the conference that while the field of studying the neuroscience of how we perceive music is still young, someday we'll know enough to be able to plant tiny neuro-bionic chips in the brain to alter perceptions and "fix" problems. It doesn't take much imagination to project a little further out and imagine a day when we start to understand how the brain processes ideas or "produces" creativity.
What if it turns out that art and creativity are merely the product of a series of switches in the brain firing off in the right sequence? Would it diminish our appreciation of art?
Artists have always occupied a special place in society in part because no one— even artists themselves—has been able go to pin down the essential act of making art and explain how inspiration and creativity work. Without a rational explanation for the process of creating art, it's much easier to romanticize artists and attribute their talent to mysterious and unknowable qualities.
But what if we are able to eventually reduce creativity to biochemical formulas? Surely that would change the way we look at artists. It might even take the mystery out of their art. If we could create neuro-bionic chips to cure brain disorders, why not pills that induce creativity on demand? If you created under the influence of these pills, would that seem like cheating, somehow? Surely some might claim that neuro-induced art would give some artists unfair advantage over others. Should we care? After all, if good art is really what's important, then who cares how it was created?
And isn't it true that art incorporates so much of the artist's experience that even if we are able to unlock biologically-enhanced creativity, it's doubtful that it would result in a surge of "super-art?"
Still, as science gets closer to the intersection of biology and creativity, and the mystery of the artistic impulse is graphed and charted, it's worth pondering what we consider to be the essential qualities that make art unique.
