A Crash Course in the Neuropsychology of Music (Part II)
Peter Cariani
Wed Jan 26, 07:30-09:30pm, E25-119
Enrollment limited: first come, first served
Limited to 50 participants.
What are the neural bases for music's psychological functions? Sequences of sonic contrasts create expectancies, violations & reconfirmations that are experienced as tensions/relaxations. Music engages brain circuits associated with emotion, pleasure, temporal prediction/reward, and semantic/syntactic processing. Developmental studies suggest newborns have basic music percepts (pitch, melody, harmony, rhythm) not acquired through learning. Comparative studies suggest that musical species are vocal-mimics. Evolutionary psychologists see music faculties as adaptations or nonadaptive by-products of language.
However, music has hard-to-explain, diverse effects: cognitive interest; emotion/mood/arousal/motivation control; dancing/exercise/motoric engagement; meditation/trance/sleep; analgesia; mnemonics/nostalgia. Instead, music may speak the "language of the brain" by structurally coupling to brain circuits, imposing repeating temporal patterns not unlike those of normal bodily & mental activities. Temporal patterns may be essential to central neural codes. Like other artificial means of inducing pleasure, taking direct structural control of our brains becomes its own reward.
Contact: Joseph R. Stein, E25-518, 452-4091, jrstein@mit.edu
Sponsor: Health Sciences & Technology
Latest update: 11-Jan-2011
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