"Your Brain’s Music Circuit Has Been Discovered"

"In 2015, he and a post-doctoral colleague, Sam Norman-Haignere, and Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, made news by locating a neural pathway activated by music and music alone. McDermott and his colleagues played a total of 165 commonly heard natural sounds to ten subjects willing to be rolled into an fMRI machine to listen to the piped-in sounds. The sounds included a man speaking, a songbird, a car horn, a flushing toilet, and a dog barking. None sparked the same population of neurons as music.

Their discovery that certain neurons have “music selectivity” stirs questions about the role of music in human life. Why do our brains contain music-selective neurons? Could some evolutionary purpose have led to neurons devoted to music? McDermott says the study can’t answer such questions. But he is excited by the fact that it shows music has a unique biological effect. “We presume those neurons are doing something in relation to the analysis of music that allows you to extract structure, following melodies or rhythms, or maybe extract emotion,” he says...

“To the extent that music functions for communication, it’s quite different from language in that it doesn’t denote specific, concrete things in the world, like something you would say,” he says. “But it obviously expresses something, typically something emotional.”"

http://nautil.us/blog/your-brains-music-circuit-has-been-discovered?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

I would love to take a psycholinguistics seminar at some point. I think a lot about communication and how much more there is to communication than words. I think about all of these experiences in the world that don't have words, or that moment when you learn a new word and it's so incredible to finally have a way to understand and communicate an experience. But there is also the way that words are often insufficient to describe something, especially emotion. This, I guess, is art: communicating something that is greater than the sum of the words that would otherwise be used, or where words are an inefficient or impossible way to communicate something.

I would be really interested in a study of emotive sounds outside of music (like sighs and groans and screams). Like, I can make a sound that communicates exhaustion/contentment/love/amusement - and I think the best actors are the ones who go outside of the words on the scripts to use their voices and bodies to communicate those kinds of nuances. It would be interesting if those activated this music circuit.