Music Builds Bridges in the Brain

Music hits right note for stroke patients

Music is in our genes

Training, Experience Can Change How Brains Work

yangjane submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.medicinenet.com)

Training and experience can affect how a person's brain is organized, says a U.S. study that compared 20 music conductors and 20 people with no music training.
The study results "show how the brain filters information from different senses is very flexible and adaptive and changes with the demands of the task at hand. Additionally, how this operates can change with highly specialized training and experience," Hairston said.

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Musical intervals in speech

addict submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.pnas.org)

Throughout history and across cultures, humans have created music using pitch intervals that divide octaves into the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Why these specific intervals in music are preferred, however, is not known. In the present study, we analyzed a database of individually spoken English vowel phones to examine the hypothesis that musical intervals arise from the relationships of the formants in speech spectra that determine the perceptions of distinct vowels.

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Mozart doesn't make you clever

Luneetty submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.nature.com)

German government decides to tackle the myth of the 'Mozart effect'. Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry. Even if the effect of musical training is confirmed in future studies, he concedes, it is highly unlikely to make your child a genius.

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psychological experiment: beauty vs. the subway

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.washingtonpost.com)

This was so amazing that I had to post it right away. 1000 people, a terror of a commute, and one of the finest musicians alive is playing some of human history's greatest art. This isn't just another, "Oh look how busy we are" pop psych piece. Watch what it does to the artist.

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