New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
nytimes.com
New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#2Key quote from the article:
"By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music."
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#3Key quote from the article: "By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music."
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26687225
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#4Very cool stuff. I remember my first year of high school - in our first music class, we were taught: "what is music?". According to the teachers, and the dictionary, "music is organised sound".
Never seemed like a satisfactory answer to me. And finally I have confirmation: the world's brightest scientific minds, at MIT, in 2016, are only just now cracking the surface of this complex question.
The word "music" has been in the human vocabulary forever. But how does the brain actually define music, and classify it as "not noise", at a neurological / chemical / acoustic level? This field has been little more than guesswork until now. Very exciting times.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#5I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?
The theory is that the brain seeks "novelty" and gets pleasure from it. If your brain tries to predict the next note and fails, synapses adjust slightly and it learns. It gets better at predicting its inputs. Learning these new patterns gives you reward, and encourages you to seek novelty like that in the future. Randomness doesn't cause new learning, neither does predictable patterns you already know.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#6I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?…
So music is a superstimulus for learning?
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#7I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?…
> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict.
You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls into a 'rut' in my head and becomes a platform on which I can have all kinds of related thoughts and experiences.
When I'm of a mind to do so, I might listen to a particular piece of music hundreds of times over the course of a week or two.
Here is an article that describes a similar kind of practice:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-fo...
Just because you can predict what's happening next doesn't make it boring. You just chose to make it boring.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#8I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?…
> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls i…
This comment is outrageously pretentious and I respectfully disagree with your ridiculous conclusion.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#9I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?…
> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls i…
I too have this experience and have 2 albums I listen to daily that I find helps me concentrate.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls i…
This comment is outrageously pretentious and I respectfully disagree with your ridiculous conclusion.
Hard to accept that you're being respectful when you're calling me pretentious.
Would you mind explaining exactly what you're disagreeing with and why?