It may not yet feature in a West End musical, but scientists say they have found an unexpected response to singin’ in the brain.
Researchers say they have found particular groups of neurons that appear to respond selectively to the sound of singing.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, a team of scientists in the US report how they made their discovery by recording electrical activity in the brains of 15 participants, each of whom had electrodes inserted inside their skulls to monitor epileptic seizures before undergoing surgery.
Photo: AP
The team recorded electrical activity in response to 165 different sounds, from pieces of instrumental music to speech and sounds such as dogs barking, and then processed them using an algorithm. They combined the results with data from fMRI brain scans previously collected from 30 different individuals to map the location of the patterns in the brain.
Samuel Norman-Haignere, a co-author of the study based at the University of Rochester, said the team decided to combine the data from the different approaches to overcome their respective weaknesses and combine their strengths.
“fMRI is one of the workhorses of human cognitive neuroscience, but it is very coarse. Intracranial data is much more precise but has very poor spatial coverage,” he said.
The results confirmed previous findings from fMRI scans that some neurons respond only to speech or respond more strongly to music. However, they also revealed populations of neurons that appear to respond selectively to the sound of singing, showing only very weak responses to other types of music or speech alone.
“These results suggest that representations of music are fractionated into subpopulations selective for different types of music, one of which is specialized for the analysis of song,” the team writes.
The work reveals these song-specific neurons appear to sit in the superior temporal gyrus, close to areas previously identified as responding particularly to music or to speech.
The authors write that it is likely the song-selective neurons were not spotted in previous work using fMRI scans alone, since the use of electrodes allows for a finer-grained measures of the activity of neurons.
The researchers add work is now under way to understand what it is about singing that these areas of the brain are responding to — for example whether it is pitch and timbre, or melodies and rhythms — while they also hope to explore how such selectivity arose during development or evolution.
“Our study presents a first step toward answering these longstanding questions,” the authors write.
They also raise the possibility of studying the impact of activating areas of the brain related to songs and exploring interactions with other parts of the brain, noting that songs can elicit particular emotions or memories.
Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London who was not involved in the research, welcomed the study.
“The singing voice is the only musical instrument that almost everyone is born with, so one might expect us to have a rather different relationship with human song, relative to other kinds of music,” she said. “We know that there are some significant differences between the brain systems that control how we speak and those that control how we sing, so it’s very interesting that some of these distinctions are also seen when we listen to human song.”
Ediz Sohoglu, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of Sussex, said the findings were striking.
“One of the interesting questions that arises is why the brain has evolved or been shaped by experience to develop such specialized neurons. Why not just use the same neurons in a multi-purpose fashion to process more than one type of sound?” he said.
“One possibility is that having specialized neurons helps a listener to focus on certain sounds in noisy environments. For example, if I am listening to my favorite singer in a concert, I might find it easier to ignore the loud conversation behind me — which would be represented in a different part of my brain.”
The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer’s 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, Nuremberg, writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn’t even a character in the miniseries. Kelley, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek, was an ambitious sort who saw in
It’s always a pleasure to see something one has long advocated slowly become reality. The late August visit of a delegation to the Philippines led by Deputy Minister of Agriculture Huang Chao-ching (黃昭欽), Chair of Chinese International Economic Cooperation Association Joseph Lyu (呂桔誠) and US-Taiwan Business Council vice president, Lotta Danielsson, was yet another example of how the two nations are drawing closer together. The security threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), along with their complementary economies, is finally fostering growth in ties. Interestingly, officials from both sides often refer to a shared Austronesian heritage when arguing for
Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Goring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Goring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately
Last week gave us the droll little comedy of People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) consul general in Osaka posting a threat on X in response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying to the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan may be an “existential threat” to Japan. That would allow Japanese Self Defence Forces to respond militarily. The PRC representative then said that if a “filthy neck sticks itself in uninvited, we will cut it off without a moment’s hesitation. Are you prepared for that?” This was widely, and probably deliberately, construed as a threat to behead Takaichi, though it
RSS