Find Me A Cure

Scientists use music — or rather the silence in symphonies — to analyse brain functioning. Paromita Kar reports

Imagine listening to a string of violins. You are not in a concert hall, but a tool in the hands of scientists in a laboratory where your brain is being carefully scanned. And the experiment actually tells you how the human brain can be sharpened.

Vinod Menon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences and of neurosciences, and his associates at Stanford University in the US, conducted such a pleasant study to understand what they call “event segmentation”. This is a process by which the brain puts into segments the continuous stream of data it gets. And it does this by extracting information about the beginnings, endings and boundaries between events of the incoming stream. The results of the study were published in the August 2 issue of the journal Neuron.

In the experiment, people — including those musically untrained — were asked to listen to symphonies of the English composer, William Boyce, chosen for his short pieces that have well-defined movements. The scientists found the brief moment of silence between two movements in a musical composition was the period when the brain was most active.

“In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements their attention is arrested,” says Menon, who did his early schooling at St Lawrence School, Calcutta.

“I’m not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way. But from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a synchronised manner,” Menon observes.

The scientists showed that music employs the same brain areas that are involved in paying attention.

“The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music,” says Jonathan Berger, a co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

The dynamic changes seen in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brain reflect its evolving responses to different phases of a symphony, conclude the researchers. An event change — or transition — activates one network, after which a second network turns the spotlight of attention on the change and, when the next event begins, updates working memory.

Studying such segmentation processes in music may be a useful window to understanding similar processes in other domains such as spoken, visual and tactile experiences, say the researchers.

So is this what they mean by the old adage, silence is golden?

Source: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

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