“For the first time, scientists identify a neural population highly selective for music.”
My friend, a condensed matter physics researcher told me recent scientific result from MIT group. Music and speech are elementary behavior in our life. From the international survey, people consider that music is a source of pleasure and positive emotion. Although music is very important for us, we do not know how our brain response to music and how music affect our emotion. Scientists have long wondered if the human brain contains neural mechanisms specific to music perception. Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds. When I read this article, I realize that this research result is not only important for neuroscientists, but also for us.
Classical music is in an embarrassing condition in this century. In the modern society, everyone feel high pressure from job, family. Most of us release the pressure and relax ourselves by listening music. Due to the promotion of popular music and time-limitation of us, more and more people are interested in popular music rather than classical music. The popular music emphasizes syncopated rhythms, slurred pitches, disjunct melodies, and other anti-classical elements. Add the fact that cuts in education have meant little has been taught about classical music and we have current situation -- difficulty getting audiences to concerts. The scientists in MIT media lab are investigating whether the music-selective population identified in their study contains subpopulations of neurons that responds to different aspects of music including rhythm, melody, and beat. This research should give us a direction for classical music education. As we known, if we want to develop classical music, we should attract audience and get them to concerts. From my perspective, we should give more effective classical music education in campus to help people to cultivate the habit of listening classical music.
How to give effective classical music education is an essential problem we must deal with. In this report, neuroscientists are going to investigate where region of brain involved in processing music. And they will give the evidence that music can affect some emotional components in our brain. As we know the relationship between music and brain, we can give every student effective music education according to personal characters. The classical music and popular music is different, everyone is also different. When we know how our brain response to different style music, the composer can create melody what people want to hear. Although classical music face a terrible time, we can change this condition using the scientific tool from neuroscientists. If you want to read this article.
please chick this link: http://neurosciencenews.com/auditory-processing-music-neuroscience-3285/Music in the brain