{"id":1265,"date":"2018-03-15T12:50:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T16:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/?p=1265"},"modified":"2018-03-19T11:21:58","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T15:21:58","slug":"the-music-hotspot-in-our-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/the-music-hotspot-in-our-brains\/","title":{"rendered":"From Lili\u2019s Desk: The Music Hotspot in Our Brains"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t
\n\t\t
\n\t\t\tDr. Lili Levinowitz<\/span>

\n\t\t\tDirector of Research & Coauthor of Music Together\u00ae<\/sup>
\n\t\t\tProfessor Emeritus, Rowan University
\n\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The first point of the Music Together philosophy is “All Children Are Musical.” Thirty years ago, this philosophical point was primarily grounded in “faith” and conviction.<\/h2>\n

It wasn’t until 2005 that scientific evidence from other disciplines emerged to support music as an essential life skill. Even more\u00a0evidence emerged in 2015, when three researchers from MIT determined that\u00a0there are\u00a0distinct cortical pathways for the processing of music versus speech and\/or acoustical sound. This “hotspot” in the brain that is dedicated only to the processing of music is called the\u00a0sulcus crevice<\/em>.\u00a0The sulcus crevice runs through the auditory cortex in the\u00a0temporal lobe directly above and a bit forward of the ears.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/div>\n

\"TheTo discover this specialized center, the researchers prepared and recorded 165 two-second clips of everyday sounds, speech sounds, and music to play to ten volunteers who were not professional musicians.\u00a0These everyday sounds\u00a0included sounds like a departing plane; a cheering crowd; water being poured into a cup; speech in several different languages; and diverse music selections, such as classical piano, mariachi trumpets, and techno dance.<\/p>\n

Each of the ten volunteers listened to these two-second\u00a0clips over and\u00a0over in different orders while lying in a\u00a0fMRI scan for\u00a090 minutes. (An fMRI scan uses radio waves and\u00a0magnetic fields to track blood flow through time.) Through a new mathematical\u00a0analysis of grouping clusters of voxel responses (brain cells) with similar activation patterns, the researchers identified neural pathways that fall into six distinct categories of response to sound.\u00a0\"SoundwaveOne of those categories of activation patterns was exclusive to music, a second one for speech, and the remaining four categories of activation patterns addressed the processing of other acoustical sounds. The discovery of this small brain region that\u00a0only processes music\u00a0<\/em>and the fact that everyone’s brain has one, certainly lends more credence to our philosophical point that\u00a0“All\u00a0Children Are Musical.”\u00a0It looks like Steven Pinker,\u00a0a psychologist at Harvard\u00a0University, is mistaken.\u00a0That is,\u00a0music is not the “auditory cheesecake” of homo sapiens.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is a way of knowing for\u00a0all humanity.<\/p>\n

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McDermott JH[1], Norman-Haignere S[2], Kanwisher NG, Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition. Neuron. 2015 Dec. 16, 88 (6): 1281-1296 doi: 10.1016\/j.neuron. 2015. 11.035<\/p>\n

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The first point of the Music Together philosophy is “All Children Are Musical.” Thirty years ago, this philosophical point was primarily grounded in “faith” and conviction. It wasn’t until 2005 that scientific evidence from other disciplines emerged to support music as an essential life skill. Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":1271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[132,134,133,135],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experts","tag-brain-research","tag-early-childhood-music-development","tag-lili-levinowitz","tag-music-together-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1270,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions\/1270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musictogether.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}