Can’t get that tune out of your head…maybe it isn’t in your brain!
Thu 10 Mar 2005
Scientists discover why songs stick in your mind
JAMES REYNOLDS
SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT
SCIENTISTS have discovered what makes a tune catchy by pinpointing the precise part of the brain where a song’s “hook” gets caught.
It is the auditory cortex - the area that handles information from the ears - that holds on to musical memories.
A team from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, played music to volunteers while using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imagery to scan their brains. As the music was played, parts of the tune were cut. Researchers found volunteers mentally filled in the blanks if a familiar song was missing snippets, although the same effect was not seen with unfamiliar tunes.
The brain activity was picked up by the scan and found to be centred in the auditory cortex.
Dr David Kraemer, one of the team whose research is published in the journal Nature, said: “We played music in the scanner, and then we hit a virtual ‘mute’ button. We found people couldn’t help continuing the song in their heads and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped.”
Maybe it was the music that Van Gogh heard and not his art that he cut off a piece of his ear, in trying to stop the music.
MarkB
(unless I -already- know how to play
)
