daniel levitin this is your brain on music

Thaut is part of a group of researchers at U of T and St. Could 'familiar music' help treat Alzheimer's disease? This means the control group participants may have responded 'much slower' because they were unfamiliar with the 'melodic and harmonic language of Western music,' he said.īut Chait said the control group did not exhibit an overall slower response and were very similar to the response to 'unfamiliar' music exhibited by the main group. 'If you grow up in a different musical language environment, so to speak, your brain responds to other genres other music cultures very, very differently,' says Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at the University of Toronto. Familiar music could give Alzheimer's patients a cognitive boost, study suggestsĬhait said the control group was predominantly made up of people from Asian backgrounds, who were 'unfamiliar with popular Western music.'.'The 'uncertainty' is about saying how much you know what's going to happen next, whereas the 'surprise' is actually comparing what you expected and what you actually heard,' says lead author Vincent Cheung of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. The research, published Thursday in Current Biology , found that chords provided more pleasure to the listener both when there is uncertainty in anticipating what comes next, and from the surprise the music elicits when the chords deviate from expectations. Emerging research reveals challengesĪ new study by researchers in Germany and Norway used artificial intelligence to analyze levels of 'uncertainty' and 'surprise' in 80,000 chords from 745 commercially successful pop songs on the U.S. It's a 'great time for music and brain research' because more people are well-trained and skilled at conducting rigorous experiments, according to Levitin. Levitin says there are more researchers studying the neurological effects of music now than ever before.įrom 1998 to 2008 there were only four media reports of evidence-based uses of music in research, while from 2009 to 2019 there were 185, Levitin said in a recent paper for the journal Music and Medicine.

'People have their own preferences and their own experience and to some extent baggage that they bring to all of this - it is challenging.' Daniel Levitin, a professor of neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal and author of the bestselling book This is Your Brain on Music. It also highlights how challenging it is to study the issue effectively due to the highly personalized nature of how we interpret it. New research is shedding light on how the brain interacts with music. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here. This is an excerpt from Second Opinion, a weekly roundup of eclectic and under-the-radar health and medical science news emailed to subscribers every Saturday morning.

Daniel levitin this is your brain on music