Wegener's Granulomatosis

Music and Brain (Part II)

The issue of modularity is poorly studied in a healthy brain, ie with a normal functional behavior. Historically it was thought that the right-handed individuals develop their musical skills in the left hemisphere, but this was disproved by studies. E 'in the 60s, in Montreal, who says the opposite idea, when you begin to study the behavior of a healthy brain and to compare them with those of a sick person through dichotic listening, or by stimulating the patients with noises, voices or music different from ear to ear. The machine that puts the sound waves in the ears of the patient and he studies the brain reactions can identify where the listener has a greater perception of the stimulus, whether from right or left. Usually the right ear more receptive to the word and this is attributed to a greater capacity for data processing by the left hemisphere. E 'in this part that is language comprehension, even for isolated words, this is one of the more lateralized, which absorbs about half of the brain, almost all the left side. That language, however, laterizzazione seems a phenomenon of exceptional, because in most cases the hemispheres of the brain sharers in the business.
Remember that the more cross-connection is of a right-left anatomical and also happens with the eyes. When this experiment is done on the musicians, they are able to perceive more correctly right ear also to non-musicians, but the intervals between notes in the melody and intonation are correct perceived by the left ear. The modules are then left brain dominant language, they probably are activated in parallel but independently of each other. Even more so when music and speech are integrated into the same sound wave, they share the work according to skills and it is difficult to distinguish between areas that have skills that are activated.
More recent analysis based on electroencephalogram (EEG), which allows you to observe the electrical changes picked up by electrodes placed on the scalp. The patient is stimulated aurally and visually, then the path is analyzed and compared in statistical terms, the transaction will follow the development over time of mental activities. Each electrode detects the locally evoked potential that is spatially identifies the areas most intensely active the brain. Obviously, this process allows a viewing more natural and allows to establish conclusively that the stimuli are related to increased blood flow to the brain because, simply put, the brain region activated needs fuel to function. With the radioactive dye into a vein in three dimensions you can locate sites where there is an increase and make high-resolution images on the brain function.
The organization of language at the neuronal level, however, is so special that some scholars speculate that the area that deals with the music is still less specialized and therefore there would be modular by default. This is because some areas of the brain respond exclusively to musical stimuli, and also of people with serious brain damage can not recognize a song but remember the words. The lack of interest in music at a particular individual can not be summoned in cases of amusia, and indeed it is easier to occur opposite, that a disinterested person to present music of brain damage but retains its ability to organize events and temporarily lose the ability to understand words and sounds around you.
A further consideration is that scholars are biologically recognized that a faculty can have as many achievements as there are activities stimulated: in music can wander distracted by listening to the composition of a work, which complicates the issue. For example, the recognition of a known song seems a simple and immediate, while in fact stimulates different modules. In an intact brain, which was not damaged, height and duration of the sounds are taken together. To account for the complexity, the frontal structures of the right hemisphere will take charge of storing the information melodic, but the left hemisphere is responsible for decoding the pitch. The same goes for rhythm and meter of a piece, whose elaboration seem to be distinct.
Once set in motion the mechanisms of the brain and stored in a data sets for each sequence and then the musical repertoire was born, where that term we understand the full range of stored representations of the music to which a person has been exposed in his life. The amazing discovery was that the modules related to emotions, which allow the individual to describe music in emotional terms, however, remain unchanged in those who have brain damage that prevents them from playing a musical sequence, and this proves once again that the modules their individual tasks and an injury can cause damage in a function or power in a very specific but not generalized changes.
In conclusion, since the experiments and then the Montreal '74 at Columbia University carried out by Bever and Chiarello, it seems that the left hemisphere is the more polite and more developed in musicians, while the right stands out more in non-prepared. The latter tend to make greater use of the right to recognize melodies, the musicians use the left side also to identify individual notes in a melody. This does not mean that musicians do not use the right hemisphere in music or that fail to use the secular left, but only one head. The organization of the brain is so flexible and can respond to the needs of the individual, in addition to the above, flexibility is demonstrated by that the holders of perfect pitch have moved slightly to the left planum temporale, an area classically Member of the language, in which case it may be that some drivers have changed the original, going to specialize in other faculties does not mean that area musicians have developed more than others for the music, but that the brain is actually a set of micro-organisms that are specialized according to the experiences that occur during maturation of the brain, and some of these portions become reserved for the music.