• April 27, 2024

Researchers from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, they have been able to compose a melody and express it in a musical score based on the brain activity of a 31-year-old woman and a 14-year-old adolescent.

In the thought process, the neurons they generate a series of electrical impulses, waves that move through the brain and that can be recorded and transformed into a recording with all the characteristics of music.

In this study, published in PlosOne.org , the neuroscientists Jing Lu and Dezhong Yao , studied the mixture and variations of the measurements on blood flow from a functional magnetic resonance machine (fMRI) and those originated by a helmet of electroencephalographic activity (EEG).

The combination of the EEG and the fMRI allowed the tone and intensity to be operated separately, making the independence create a value for the randomness of the musical composition.

In this way, the scientists used images from the encephalogram to create the tones and duration of the notes, and magnetic resonance images to control their intensity.

Therefore, with this new method it is possible to transfer the cerebral electrical fluctuations to mark the tone and the blood torrents to measure the intensity, but also, it is intended that it can serve to help people with stress and anxiety .

The levels of excitation of the brain (mental state) and the emotion generated by music are implicitly related as a bridge between the world of mind and perception, so that this type of research allows us to better understand those mental processes as a whole.

How does the brain process music?

When we hear some sound, melody, song, the ear is in charge of analyzing and shredding those sound waves. These signals are transmitted to a bundle of nerve fibers known as the auditory nerve, which leads to brain as if they traveled by separate cables.

According to the site comoves.unam.mx, the first stop in the brain is the thalamus structure located in the center of the organ and that retransmits the signal to the primary auditory cortex. It identifies the frequency and intensity (the note and volume, say) of the tone that is heard.

The auditory cortices (primary, secondary and tertiary) are located on both sides of the brain, in a region called the lateral sulcus, or Silvio's sulcus.

But identifying the note and the volume of the sounds that are coming is not enough to recognize them as music. For that, there is the secondary cortex, which analyzes information about harmony (the relation of the notes that sound at the same time), the melody (the relation of the notes in their temporal succession) and the rhythm (the pattern of accented notes and weak notes).

Now we just need to integrate all that information. That is the responsibility of the tertiary cortex, and from there the signal goes to other brain departments, which will be responsible for transforming all that information into chemical signals for the rest of the body, whose effects can be transformed into movement and emotions.

As an example, music stimulates areas in the brain control muscles (particularly in people who play an instrument), centers of pleasure that are activated during feeding and sex, the regions associated with emotions and the areas responsible for interpreting the language.

Therefore, the importance of this type of research is that they can open a door to the full understanding of our brain.

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Video Medicine: Exploring Music's Impact on the Brain (April 2024).