
New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’ - sew
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/science/new-ways-into-the-brains-music-room.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&mtrref=www.nytimes.com
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Houshalter
I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity:
[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html)

Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and
have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen
to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to
teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?

The theory is that the brain seeks "novelty" and gets pleasure from it. If
your brain tries to predict the next note and fails, synapses adjust slightly
and it learns. It gets better at predicting its inputs. Learning these new
patterns gives you reward, and encourages you to seek novelty like that in the
future. Randomness doesn't cause new learning, neither does predictable
patterns you already know.

~~~
vinceguidry
> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and
> have learned to predict.

You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same
piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually
not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of
experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The
piece falls into a 'rut' in my head and becomes a platform on which I can have
all kinds of related thoughts and experiences.

When I'm of a mind to do so, I might listen to a particular piece of music
hundreds of times over the course of a week or two.

Here is an article that describes a similar kind of practice:

[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-
fo...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-force-
reading-book-100-times-great-idea)

Just because you can predict what's happening next doesn't make it boring. You
just chose to make it boring.

~~~
quaristice
This comment is outrageously pretentious and I respectfully disagree with your
ridiculous conclusion.

~~~
vinceguidry
Hard to accept that you're being respectful when you're calling me
pretentious.

Would you mind explaining exactly what you're disagreeing with and why?

------
Terr_
> Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits
> are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all
> sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s
> sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to
> songs with lyrics.

I've long had a pet-theory that music with voices in it interrupts my train of
thought (especially while programming) in a way that instrumental/electronic
music avoids.

Of course, if unnamed scientists discover that listening to voices is
completely separate from writing text, that'd be evidence against it.

~~~
byroniczero
“Very few drums or vocals” is one of the qualities valued by the Music for
Programming podcast:
[http://musicforprogramming.net/?about](http://musicforprogramming.net/?about)

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pjdorrell
In 2015 I developed a theory that the human response to music is a mutated
copy of an evolutionary pre-cursor, and the most likely pre-cursor is a
response to speech-like sounds, where this response plays a role in the
initial learning of language. I have documented the development of my theory
in my "What is Music?" blog at
[http://whatismusic.info/blog/](http://whatismusic.info/blog/).

In their analysis of the human auditory cortex, Norman-Haignere et al found
six distinct functional groups of neurons. One of those groups is identified
as a "music area". Another one of the groups is a close match for the
evolutionary pre-cursor that I predicted - a group of neurons that respond to
speech sounds, whether or not those sounds belong to the listener's native
language.

The initial assumption of my theory is that the primary function of music is
to temporarily alter mood. Evidence for this function comes from the strong
effect that music has on some people who are "addicted" to daydreaming.

My theory suggests that the response to speech-like sounds also induces an
altered mood, when an infant is learning language for the first time. This
alteration in mood helps the infant to identify language as a special stimulus
which is important and which needs to be processed and understood as something
that follows its own peculiar and complex set of rules which are not
particularly related to the rules that describe all the other aspects of
reality that the infant is learning about. The altered mood may also help the
infant to learn that the meaning attached to some language utterances relates
to things beyond immediate reality, ie things that other people are thinking
about which are not in the "here and "now". (This would relate to the similar
effect that music has on our emotional reactions to things we are thinking
about that are not in the "here and now".)

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jaza
Very cool stuff. I remember my first year of high school - in our first music
class, we were taught: "what is music?". According to the teachers, and the
dictionary, "music is organised sound".

Never seemed like a satisfactory answer to me. And finally I have
confirmation: the world's brightest scientific minds, at MIT, in 2016, are
only just now cracking the surface of this complex question.

The word "music" has been in the human vocabulary forever. But how does the
brain actually define music, and classify it as "not noise", at a neurological
/ chemical / acoustic level? This field has been little more than guesswork
until now. Very exciting times.

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jlewallen
Interesting read. Though my comment is on a benign technical detail. There
were links in the article to other articles that I expected to work given how
recently the article was published. For example, I was interested in reading
about the 40k year old flutes -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/oldest-%20musical-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/oldest-%20musical-
instruments-are-even-older-than-first-thought.html) Curious that the link
would appear at all. I'd think there would be constraints on this during
publication?

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rayuela
Link to the paper:
[http://web.mit.edu/svnh/www/homepage/Publications_files/Norm...](http://web.mit.edu/svnh/www/homepage/Publications_files/Norman-
Haignere_Kanwisher_McDermott_2015.pdf)

------
EwanG
Key quote from the article: "By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory
cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns,
the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively
to the sound of music — any music."

~~~
xkcd-sucks
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26687225

