NEW STUDY SHOWS:

MORE OF THE BRAIN USED WHEN MAKING MUSIC

On November 8, 1998 at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Los Angeles, Dr. Lawrence Parsons of the University of Texas-San Antonio discussed the results of his research which showed that significantly more of the brain was being used during music making that previously thought.

Through his use of imaging research, Dr. Parsons analyzed music's influence on the brain by examining expert musicians. One of the studies found that expert musicians use widely dispersed, interconnected brain areas when they intently listen to different aspects of a piece of music including its rhythm, melody, and harmony. IN addition, he and his colleagues found that there is an area in the right half of the brain that interprets written musical notes and passages of notes, that is known to interpret written letters, and words. Moreover, they report an overall, strong activation in the cerebellum, a brain area traditionally thought to coordinate only fine movement or motor behavior.

"We believe this is the first detailed study of the functional neuro-anatomy of the expert musicians' comprehension of musical structure." says Parsons. "The research shows more clearly than ever that music is represented in mechanisms widely distributed throughout the brain rather than localized in a single region as are other kinds of information, such as visual or movement information." In addition, the researchers say that their findings show that the structure of music, and our use of it, are similar in key respects to language structure and use. "An understanding of the brain locations that represent the separate aspects of music will help us identify the neural mechanisms that are specific to music, specific to language and are shared between the two," says Parsons. "The finding that there is a right brain region for notes and musical passages that corresponds in location to a left brain region for letters and words illustrates how a neural mechanism may be present in each of the two brain hemispheres becomes special adapted for analogous purposes but with different information contexts."

Non-musicians also are able to direct attention to the musical components of harmony, melody and rhythm and would therefore produce similar, but probably smaller activation in most of the same music brain areas, according to the researchers.

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