Music and the brain

                A PBS article on music and how it is processed in the brain found that as we develop our brain is wired for the music of a certain area. “If you're born listening to Chinese opera, your brain is going to become wired to the rules of that musical form. If you're born listening to Pakistani music, Indian music, Indian ragas, your brain will become wired to those. Our brain is plastic, and malleable, and able to wire itself up to whatever language we hear, to learn those rules.” This also means that people are wired with the ability to understand music. He thinks we learn the rules subconsciously just by listening to our culture’s music. He also finds that good music does make us think because it breaks the standards our prefrontal cortex has come to expect. At the end the reporter addresses the fear that knowing how the brain processes music will reduce our enjoyment of it, but the neuroscientist says that he has only come to love it more by knowing how complicated it is. This article seems to fit the idea we discussed that high music is that which makes a lasting impression and causes us to think.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june07/music_02-05.html

                Do you feel music should make us think more or feel more?

Music and Language

                We discussed briefly in class the idea of music as a language that people can understand and appreciate better as they achieve higher degrees of fluency. I am inclined to agree that this is true. People with very little musical knowledge have still grown up exposed to music and therefore have some level of musical understanding even if they cannot explain it. I wonder if music is actually one language or if it a system of languages. Different uses of scale are used in different areas and so people have different systems of recognition based on these differences. As was said in class, a song using the scale common to India might sound happy to us while sad to another person. This seems to me equivalent to a foreign language. We might be able to make some sense of certain aspects, the way some words sound similar enough to be recognized in a foreign language, but the differences will strike us as confusing. This makes music into the heading under which a bunch of categories fall. Music in the U.S. represents one language, that in India another. I tried researching this idea on the web to see if I could find any authors that agreed or disagreed and I found a text by Friederike Flottmann that said “musical information is, to a large extent, processed in the brain areas also involved in, and previously believed to be exclusive networks for, language processing in the human brain” (19). This text aims to analyze whether training in music can help a person to learn a foreign language. They develop their hypothesis in part because of the similar aspects of the brain used in both language and music. Their similar positions in the brain seem to hint at some similarities in the way the brain processes both. Languages that use different intonations and tones from English can be hard to learn and almost impossible to sound natural when using. They do find that teaching music training in addition to teaching the language increases the ability to distinguish sounds in the foreign language. In the study German students were taught Finnish with the control groups only learning the language and the experimental group learning the language plus music training.

This text is available on google books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=98K6K1km_e0C&pg=PA19&dq=music+as+foreign+language&hl=en&ei=dAfCTdjsFIfMgQeTxqDVDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

How similar are music and language and do you think learning one would help in understanding the other?

Response to Julia

Why do humans voluntarily watch extremely violent shows and movies in which people are being tortured?

                I read something recently that suggested that people like violent shows because they cause strong emotions which people find pleasurable without the danger that would be associated with the same situations in reality. It is a safe way of thrill seeking like bungee jumping or other sports. The emotions are very strong, but people can always remember, more with shows than activities, that they are safe. The catharsis theory could also apply where people release their own anger and negative emotions through watching someone else act them out. Television violence could be a way to experience emotions people have been taught to ignore. When someone is really angry at their boss they cannot say anything to their boss but they can really allow themselves to feel and express the emotions that went along with that anger as they watch violent television. A majority of television also includes violence, so it is possible that some people are so used to violence in television they do not even notice it, unless it is significantly more graphic than the usual show. Violence in television can also add drama. If a person is in a ticking time bomb situation suspense is increased and we get to really plumb the depths of the character by seeing how they react in emergency situations.

                Why do people who do not believe in the supernatural still find violence perpetrated by supernatural entities scary?

On recent discussions about non-human animals

I was talking with my best friend yesterday and this is a snippet of the conversation I think was kind of interesting.

Me: Drusilla’s sick

Her: Are you taking her to the doctor?

Me: I like that you said doctor.

Her: Well, you talk about her like a person so I think of her like that sometimes.

As you may have predicted, Drusilla is my dog (and she’s feeling better). I think this conversation is interesting because it made me realize that I almost never refer to Dru as a dog and because a lot of people seem to take so much care to distinguish (non-human) animals from people. We call almost any medical professional as a doctor. It does not matter what kind; pediatrician, general practitioner, psychiatrist but with veterinarians it is inappropriate. I also had a class on the same day where the teacher said that we are not animals, we are people. All of the science majors looked at him like he was an idiot, but it was somewhat disturbing to me that nobody said anything about this statement and that some people seemed to simply accept it. A few over the course of the discussion agreed to it saying that there is no way people’s technology does not make them superior to animals. Cheetahs are not faster, for example, because people have airplanes. I also saw a T.V. show a friend wanted to watch where one of the characters, portrayed as one of the few moral characters, said that animals, of course, have no soul. I swore at the T.V. character, which the people I was watching with found funny, but I do wonder why so many cases of people professing themselves superior to animals occurred in the span of about three days.

Why do you think so many humans feel they are superior to non-human animals?