Music Instinct by Ball Philip;

Author:Ball, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

A tour of the grey matter

Here’s the basic problem for neuroscience: how on earth can the extraordinary richness of human experience be summed up by some bright spots on a brain map, where the wizardry of nuclear magnetic resonance has spotted an increase in blood flow? Or by some electrical impulses sensed by electrodes taped crudely to the cranium? How can we ever hope to forge an equation that links Bach and Picasso to this grapefruit-sized mass of jelly?

If I sound somewhat dismissive about the current techniques of neuroscience, it is simply because of the magnitude of this problem. But even the crude generalizations we can now make about the workings of the brain, thanks to these blurry, absurdly coarse-grained maps of cogitation, are of tremendous worth. By identifying which regions of the brain we use for different tasks, we can form a picture of how the brain classifies and interprets the very nature of the cognitive demand: which parts of its wet hardware it selects for the job, and thus which jobs apparently share processing skills in common. This is a large part of what the neuroscience of music is about: spotting when the brain uses circuitry whose purpose we already know, or suspect, from its involvement in other functions.

It’s simplistic but largely unavoidable to portray the brain as a vast bureaucracy of specialized departments, some in constant communication and others barely aware of their mutual existence. Most prominently, the brain is divided into two hemispheres, on the left and the right of the cranium. One of the virtues of musical neuroscience is that it undermines the tiresome trope of ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ processing, which popular belief labels as logical or analytical, and emotional or intuitive, respectively. That’s not a totally false picture – the hemispheres do show some tendency towards specialization, musical tasks included. Pitch perception, for example, seems to be mostly (but not entirely) localized in the right hemisphere. But the full picture is more complicated; for example, while left-hemisphere processing seems dominant for positive emotions, the right hemisphere becomes engaged for negative ones.

Most of the brain’s volume is taken up by the cerebral cortex (often simply called the cortex), which is divided in each hemisphere into four lobes: the frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital (Figure 9.1). These have quite generalized functions. The frontal lobe is involved in planning and the organization of perception, and also (to the rear) in motor and spatial skills. The temporal lobe deals with memory and hearing – it houses the hippocampus, the seat of long-term memory, as well as the primary auditory cortex, where sound stimuli coming from the ear are first processed. It also has a role in handling the semantics of speech. The parietal lobe integrates various kinds of sensory information, for example those governing our sense of space. And the occipital lobe specializes in vision processing. Below the temporal lobe and close to the brain stem is the cerebellum, the oldest part of the brain, which governs our emotional responses as well as coordination and motor control.

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