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Monday, November 9, 1998
Study Suggests Music May Someday Help Repair Brain
Findings: Melody, harmony and rhythm stimulate areas responsible for
memory, other basic activities.
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Times Science Writer
The music that makes the foot tap, the fingers snap and the
pulse quicken stirs the brain at its most fundamental levels,
suggesting that scientists one day may be able to retune
damaged minds by exploiting rhythm, harmony and melody, according
to new research presented Sunday.
Exploring the neurobiology of music, researchers discovered
direct evidence that music stimulates specific regions of the brain
responsible for memory, motor control, timing and language. For the
first time, researchers also have located specific areas of mental
activity linked to emotional responses to music.
In the long run, music could become a way of retooling brains
afflicted with a variety of emotional disorders or neurological
diseases, the researchers said.
"That's our goal," said neuroscientist Anne Blood, who conducted
the study at McGill University in Montreal. "You can activate
different parts of the brain, depending on what music you listen to. So
music can stimulate parts of the brain that are underactive in these
disorders. Over time, we could retrain the brain in these disorders."
The findings, presented at a meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience in Los Angeles, underscore how music--as an almost
universal language of mood, emotion and desire--orchestrates a wide
variety of neural systems to cast its evocative spell.
"Undeniably, there is a biology of music," said Harvard University
Medical School neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo. "There is no
question that there is specialization within the human brain for the
processing of music. Music is biologically part of human life, just as
music is aesthetically part of human life."
In a series of new studies made public Sunday, researchers found
that the brain:
* Responds directly to harmony. Using a medical PET scanner to
monitor changes in neural activity, neuroscientists at McGill
discovered that different parts of the brain involved in emotion are
activated depending on whether the music is pleasant or dissonant.
"Everyone knows music can produce powerful emotional effects.
This suggests different emotions are represented in different parts of
the brain," Blood said.
* Interprets written musical notes and scores in an area on the
brain's right side. That region corresponds to an area on the opposite
side of the brain known to handle written words and letters. So, in
studying the brains of expert musicians, researchers uncovered an
anatomical link between music and language. "We are guessing [the
area] is involved in the visual processing of the score itself," said
Lawrence Parsons at the University of Texas in San Antonio. "On
the left, the same area is involved in reading."
* Grows in response to musical training the way a muscle
responds to exercise. In a study of classically trained musicians,
researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston
discovered that male musicians have significantly larger brains than
men who have not had extensive musical training. The area of the
brain called the cerebellum, which contains about 70% of the brain's
neurons, was about 5% larger in expert male musicians. Researchers,
however, found no such size increase in the brains of female
musicians, but said they may not have studied enough women to be
certain.
"Musicians are not just born with these differences," said Dr.
Gottfried Schlaug, the neurologist who conducted the research. The
cerebellum grows as a result of the constant practice of the virtuoso
motor skills needed to play an instrument, he said.
Overall, music seems to involve the brain at almost every level.
Even allowing for cultural differences in musical tastes, the
researchers found evidence of music's remarkable power to affect
neural activity no matter where they looked in the brain, from
primitive regions found in all animals to more recently evolved regions
thought to be distinctively human.
"We find that harmony, melody and rhythm had distinct patterns
of brain activity. They involved both the right and left sides of the
brain," Parsons said.
Melody affects both sides of the brain equally. Harmony and
rhythm seem to activate the left side of the brain more strongly than
the right side.
The neural mechanisms of music may have originally developed
as a way of communicating emotion as a precursor to speech, the
researchers suggested, offering insights into how the mind integrates
sensory information with emotion and meaning.
Already, researchers are looking for ways to harness the power
of music to change the brain.
Preliminary research in laboratory animals and humans suggests
that music may play some role in enhancing intelligence. Indeed, so
seductive is the possibility that music can boost a child's IQ that
politicians in Florida, Georgia and other states are lobbying for
schoolchildren to be exposed regularly to Mozart sonatas, although
such research has yet to be replicated or confirmed.
The scientists Sunday said the new research could help the
clinical practice of neurology, including cognitive rehabilitation. As a
therapeutic tool, for example, some doctors already use music to help
rehabilitate stroke patients. Surprisingly, some stroke patients who
have lost their ability to speak retain their ability to sing, and that
opens an avenue for therapists to retrain the brain's speech centers.
"Patients sing what they want to say and some improve their
fluency," Parsons said.
Copyright 1998 Los
Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
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