A very good day, fine folks of twitter!!
This week, we've gone over a bunch of interesting things about music and the brain, and today, we're going to talk mysteries and theories, then have a SUPER FUN DISCUSSION FORUM PARTY EXTRAVAGANZA.
So the big question (according to me) is why is music so ubiquitous? Does everyone have their deerstalkers on?
In the evolution of music thread, we went over music as a potential proto-language and how we've kept it because of its unique role in social communication:
I completely skimmed over animal song, but one important point to remember is that animals do use vocalizations to communicate
Courtship rituals, in particular, were one possibility for human music. I would be first in line to "musicians are the sexiest humans" conference, but the obvious flaw here is that non-musicians still have sex.
Courtship aside, social signalling using music is Very Much A Thing, and people have entire identities based around what kind of music they listen to.
Neurobiologically, our favourite music gives us tingly feelings. This uses the limbic system, which is very old in the evolutionary record.
Emotionally, music can match our mood, regulate our mood, reinforce our mood, or induce a new mood.
This is particularly relevant to music therapy with individuals who cannot regulate mood independently. And here's where we get to something *new*. ENTRAINMENT.
Entrainment refers to a body changing its rhythms/state to match something in the environment. Think about tapping your foot, or dancing. You are entraining yourself to the pulse of the music.
Surface-level, we can see this with the aforementioned toe-tapping and Fabulous. Dance. Moves. On a deeper level, breathing rate and heartbeat will also entrain to a regular pulse.
This is incredibly useful working with individuals who are minimally-conscious and individuals that have low range of motion. A personal example from when I worked in palliative care. A common issue is pain, and this is treated with opiates.
Even with sedation, individuals may experience agitation, increased heart rate, etc. In these cases, I would be called in and provide improvised music based on the individual's bodily cues, gradually moving to regular, slow pulses.
In time, the individual's breathing and heart rate would slow to match the music, even if the the individual was not fully conscious.
This physical embodiment of music adds another laaaayer to our auditory experience, as well as visual components for overt movements.
Including studies on how performers communicate their emotional intentions through physical movements in performance:
researchgate.net/profile/Marc_T…
researchgate.net/profile/Marc_T…
You can also link movements to musical features using our old favourite - FEATURE EXTRACTION!
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
See here for a bit on extraction and many, many Céline Dion gifs:
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
See here for a bit on extraction and many, many Céline Dion gifs:
Another interesting thing is music's ability to endure during injury, neurodegeneration, illness, etc. If you recall Wednesday's music-language day, the two behaviours have similar, though not identical, networks:
Part 1:
Part 1:
Part 2 here:
Music may get around linguistic and cognitive impairments by being a more widely-distributed network. If networks are like machines, language relies on many pieces working together to receive and transmit information. If one key piece is damaged, the entire system may go offline.
Language, in many ways, is the annoying-string-of-Christmas-lights of the brain.
Music, having evolved to communicate to different specs than language, may be able to get around language issues by being a more robust machine. Music, in this case, is your-aunt's-1989-Toyota-corolla of the brain.
And that brings us to the more general concepts of music and the brain, namely, how do we conceptualize, segment, and study them.
Music listening and music-making provides us with a lot of data. Data from the music itself, brain activity, physical actions...EVERYONE GETS A DATA.
This means analysis can be extremely fine-grained (think about only focusing on how frequency affects EEG activity listening to tones), or extremely broad (think about measuring brain activity in an improvising string quartet)
I presented music as a 4-tier language-like system, because that's how I think of it, but there are so many other possibilities! One I'm super excited about is music as an ongoing decision-making process that can be explained using algorithms, like in machine learning.
One important thing is the interactive nature of the human brain. The areas involved in processing/generating specific stimuli are important to define, but of equal importance is understanding how they work in concert (HAH!) with other players in the network.
To go EVEN FURTHER, scientists, musicians, and clinicians need to work together. Me, to everyone:
Sooo let's do that.
I'm going to go work on some *Exciting Matlab Stuff* now, but join in this afternoon for the promised SUPER FUN DISCUSSION FORUM PARTY EXTRAVAGANZA.
