Thread by @realscientists

Please keep your teen music rolling in. It's time for LANGUAGE DAY, PART TWO.

We've gone from music and language's shared auditory processing network to their homologous networks for handling syntactic, semantic, and emotional content, so let's level up. IT'S PRODUCTION TIME.

As we learned on BRAIN DAY, generating behaviour involves coordinated action from brain areas involved in planning, motor movement, monitoring, and memory

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Here, there are three main players. PLAYER THE FIRST is goal-oriented movement, and involves the putamen and globus pallidus. These sub-cortical structures regulate voluntary movement.

PLAYER THE SECOND is is motor activity itself, which includes the supplementary motor area, the middle-temporal gyrus, the precuneus, the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum. These regions are widely-distributed, and they help you DO the movement.

PLAYER THE THIRD is executive function. This is the network that oversees what you're doing and makes adjustments so that the output matches the plan, and updates to accommodate any change in environment.

Regions here include the pre-motor cortex, cingulate cortex, and frontal and temporal gyri.

Fascinating paper here on the production of novel melody and speech side-by-side here:
neuroarts.org/pdf/music&lang…

These areas are quite similar for both, but there's one major difference. In music, there's a deactivation in dorsolateral (upper) areas of the prefrontal cortex (back here: journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…). This is the suspension of inhibitions that happens in solo musical improv.

Now, we're at the final level of music and language as per our tree model. SOCIAL INTERACTION. Combining everything below and maintaining coherent output while reacting to novel input and updating your plans on the fly requires extra regions in the pre-frontal cortex.

(remember: this is where the regions that show deactivation in music reactivate. If you add another person, your social monitoring system needs to be present and correct)

So that's how we get here in music improvisation:

There's a lot going on, and a lot of common ground, but there are differences that make things interesting. One of the most interesting illustrations of these differences are people with language impairments retaining the ability to sing/make music.

We'll do a dive into music and health/music therapy tomorrow, but for now, take a look at the commonalities and the differences, and have a think about what could be going on.