Summary Map of Brain Activity During Musical Experience
The figure below shows a rough, schematic diagram of various regions of the brain and their activity during musical experience. By sliding your mouse over each labeled region you can access further information describing the roles of these regions. See below this figure a description of some of the flowing between regions (indicated by the arrows) that occurs during musical experience.
The following quotation from This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin (p. 128), gives a good initial summary of how processing of musical experience flows through the brain:
All sound begins at the eardrum. Right away, sounds get segregated by pitch. Not much later, speech and music probably diverge into separate processing circuits. The speech circuits decompose the signal in order to identify individual phonemes - the consonants and vowels that make up our alphabet and phonetic system. The music circuits start to decompose the signal and separately analyze pitch, timbre, contour, and rhythm. The output of the neurons performing these tasks connects to regions in the frontal lobe that put all of it together and try to figure out if there is any structure or order to the temporal patterning of it all. The frontal lobes access our hippocampus and regions in the interior of the temporal lobe and ask if there is anything in our memory banks that can help understand this signal. Have I heard this particular pattern before? If so, when? What does it mean? Is it part of a larger sequence whose meaning is unfolding right now in front of me?
What needs to be added to this initial summary (of course, Levitin does add most of this additional material elsewhere in his book), is the role of emotional processing (starting with the amygdala [A']) and its relation to mood (via the nucleus accumbens [N]), and long term memory (notice that the amygdala [A'] is intimately connected to the hippocampus [H], and to the cerrebelum [C] which also relates to emotion and learned processes). It is also known that the heart, whose beating rate is strongly influenced by emotion and movement (especially dancing), releases hormones into the bloodstream that trigger mood affecting hormones (such as dopamine) within the brain.
We can summarize this discussion by saying that practically the entire brain/body system is strongly activated during musical experience. It is no wonder that music is such an ancient, and important part of human culture. Its study and application have wide application to our perception of beauty in the world, and to our happiness (and this is perhaps why music therapy, for example, has made contributions to treatment of emotional and other psychological disorders).
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