{"id":91,"date":"2010-06-01T20:16:46","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T20:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/brain_blog\/?p=91"},"modified":"2014-11-17T03:09:24","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T03:09:24","slug":"neuroscientist-studies-music-and-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/brain_blog\/2010\/06\/neuroscientist-studies-music-and-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Neuroscientist studies Music and the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A version of this article appeared in print on June 1, 2010, on page D2 of the New York edition.<\/p>\n

Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?<\/p>\n

A. I\u2019ve been passionate about two things since childhood \u2014 science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.<\/p>\n

But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.<\/p>\n

I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: \u201cYou must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we\u2019ll give it a shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called \u201cA Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.\u201d When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn\u2019t yet a recognized field.<\/p>\n

Q. WHEN DID IT GO MAINSTREAM?<\/p>\n

A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies.<\/p>\n

Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything.<\/p>\n

I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities.<\/p>\n

Q. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?<\/p>\n

A. One example. There\u2019s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug\u2019s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over.<\/p>\n

Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer\u2019s. There are Alzheimer\u2019s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we\u2019re learning about how memory works.<\/p>\n

Q. RECENTLY, YOU\u2019VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?<\/p>\n

A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution \u2014 meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of \u201cEverybody\u201d by the Backstreet Boys!<\/p>\n

My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you\u2019d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.<\/p>\n

Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?<\/p>\n

A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, \u201cSnowball likes to dance to this.\u201d One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played \u201cEverybody\u201d to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s design an experiment to see if this is real,\u201d I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he\u2019d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it.<\/p>\n

Q. YOU SAY THAT SNOWBALL CHANGED YOUR THINKING. HOW?<\/p>\n

A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn\u2019t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?<\/p>\n

Since working with Snowball, I\u2019ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds \u2014 also vocal learners.<\/p>\n

We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses.<\/p>\n

What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.<\/p>\n

Q. IS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND MONEY FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH?<\/p>\n

A. It easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like \u201ccomplex nonlinguistic auditory processing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in recent years, it\u2019s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
\nPublished: May 31, 2010 Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published \u201cMusic, Language, and the Brain,\u201d Oliver Sacks described it as \u201ca major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.\u201d The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[59,55,1],"tags":[69,68],"yoast_head":"\nNeuroscientist studies Music and the Brain - The Brain and Music<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/brain_blog\/2010\/06\/neuroscientist-studies-music-and-the-brain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Neuroscientist studies Music and the Brain - The Brain and Music\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Published: May 31, 2010 Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published \u201cMusic, Language, and the Brain,\u201d Oliver Sacks described it as \u201ca major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.\u201d The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. 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