From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Nov 16 1998 - 10:35:32 MST
Apropos the neuroscience of the music, I just found this at biomednews
(http://biomednet.com/biomednews):
Feel the Music
by Julie Clayton
...
Anne Blood and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal,
have previously found which areas of the brain are involved in pitch
perception, imagery or memory for melodies. To test whether emotional
reactions to music could also be pinpointed to different brain regions
they performed PET scans in 10 volunteers as they listened to music
(all having been brought up under the same Western influence to
eliminate bias). To evoke pleasure or displeasure, the music had been
composed especially as six different versions of the same original
score that varied in their level of consonance. At one extreme, the
music was highly consonant, with all the notes sounding pleasant
together. At the other extreme, combinations of notes used sounded
progressively more unpleasant.
They found that as the music increased in unpleasantness,
the parahippocampal gyrus became active on the right side of the
brain,an area which is known to contain emotion-related
neurons. As music became more pleasant to listen to, the frontal
lobe regions, orbitofrontal cortex, frontal pole, and
subcallosalcingulate, became activated on both sides of
the brain. These areas were different from those involved in
music perception, but are also known to be involved in
emotion. Next, Blood will be looking at people listening to their most
loved, and most hated piece of music, in order to maximise the
strength of emotional responses, including during the "shivers down
the spine" phenomenon. It is unlikely, however, that these imagine
studies could yet demonstrate the music preferences of different
people.
[Nice result, although I'm having some personal theories about the
role of parahippocampal gyrus in dissonant music; the other areas seem
to be properly emotional. ]
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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