'Your' song could soon help repair your brain

Friday, November 27, 1998: Musically minded Canadian researchers have unlocked a secret in our brains that promises to help treatment of neurological disorders.

They have discovered a region of the brain where blood flow increases when it hears music it loves and another region where it pumps harder in response to music it hates.

The researchers with music on the brain are led by Anne Blood at the Montreal Neurological Institute, attached to McGill University.

"In the long run, this is significant for those with a neurological illness where there is a decreased blood flow in part of the brain", says Ms. Blood.

"Suppose a certain type of music produces an emotion that increases the blood flow. Over time, if you keep playing that music, then you retrain the brain to become more active in that region. Reaching that conclusion could be a bit of a stretch right now. But we are going that way."

Ms. Blood and colleagues are not new to using music to study the brain. Already they have found the areas that are responsible for pitch perception and the ability to remember melodies.

"Music is very good at letting us examine emotion in general, and this is helping us research anxiety, depression, and emotional disorders", she said.

The latest study set out to pinpoint areas of the brain that are affected emotionally by music. Ten volunteers were monitored by a brain imaging scanner as they listened to six different versions of the same piece of music, which had been written especially for the purpose.

At one end of the scale, the music was composed with the highest level of consonance - all the notes sounding pleasant together. At the other extreme, the music combined the greatest level of dissonance - none of the notes sounding pleasant together. Both had an effect on areas of the brain already known to be involved in emotion.

The more unpleasant the music sounded, the more active an area on the right side of the brain called the parahippocampal gyrus became. The more pleasant volunteers found the music, the more active their frontal lobe regions became.

The volunteers were asked to describe each piece of music with one of a list of adjectives, ranging from calm to irritated and relaxed to tense. Those descriptions mostly matched the emotional levels recorded.

by Richard Starnes
The Ottawa Citizen

janet paterson - 51 now /41 dx /37 onset - almonte/ontario/canada
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