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Music Memories Stored In Different Part of Brain Than Other Memories
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have long believed that the ability to learn and appreciate music was stored in a different part of the brain than other types of memories. Now, researchers in Berlin think that they have concluded that theory. Dr. Christoph J. Ploner, Carson Finke, and Nazli Esfahani at the Department of Neurology at the Virchow campus in Berlin, Germany have examined a man who has lost all of his memories but has retained his ability to remember and learn songs."
The full text of the research online here.
I'd be curious to find out how psychological trauma affects music memory. Nothing fucks with memory worse than severe psychological trauma other than traumatic brain injuries). One of the reasons, as far as I understand, that psychological trauma affects memory is because adrenaline and cortisol are hormones used to form flashbulb memories. People who are traumatized often produce these hormones for longer durations and this damages the brain. If people who have psychologically caused memory loss can still form memories of music normally, that would imply that adrenaline and cortisol don't have an impact. It would also imply that music can't form flashbulb memories.
On a practical note, this might also imply that sound memories (like the sound of a gunshot or the words someone spoke in a violent confrontation) are less useful in court if they can't form flashbulb memories.
If you understood why that was then maybe you wouldn't sigh.
We pretty much rely on people with borked bits of grey matter for pretty much everything we know about the brain. That is to say, to understand the whole we have to understand how all the parts work together, which means looking at the parts in isolation, which means looking at people who have parts of their brain that are swithced off.
Unless you're advocating labotomising a load of people with the hopes of raising the statistical significance...
This is much more prevalent than one guy. Stroke victims who can't talk can often sing. So when they want to say something, they can simply say it to some made-up tune.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The Summary links to a (somewhat useful) fluff review by the Medical Daily Web Site (and will hit the visitor with 37 cookies). Fwiw, readers at Slashdot may prefer bypassing it by going the Cell's Current Biology Web Site where they'll be able to find the Authors' Original Summary or perhaps the Full Text instead.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
Unless you're advocating labotomising a load of people with the hopes of raising the statistical significance...
Screw statistical significance, this is obviously a source of unauthorized copies of musical compositions without compensation to the rights holders!
BURN IT OUT.
My grandfather has very advanced Alzheimers. He's been to the point for a while where he can't recognize family and doesn't have much to say about anything. However, in the 40's & 50's, he was a musician (played harmonica in a jazz-standards harmonica band). Through the 80's & 90's, he had a recording studio in his house and kept his music alive through multitracking himself. He definitely built his music into parts of his brain that haven't been ravaged by the disease.
Given a harmonica, he can bring back those songs, almost note-perfect.
I've also wondered if it's possible that music (or the ability to play) gets pushed into some sort of muscle memory rather than memory in the brain. As a musician myself, I know I can think about other things as I play things that are super-well-rehearsed. My fingers just somehow find the right notes.
Does this mean you store text in non-song form in a different location than text in song-form?
Since that looks like a binary decision: how much melody is required for the sudden switch from the one storage location to the other?
Reminds me of Scott Adam's Spasmodic Dysphonia, and how he could not speak normally, but sing and speak in rhyme. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/scott_adams_fixes_own_brain_can_now_speak/
It's a different disease, but similar in the way that music is treated different by the brain.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I have always been able to memorize plays or poetry with almost effortless ease. In fact in my acting days at school I often knew pretty much all the words of all the parts (except for the acts/scenes that I was not involved in rehearsing) and I can still quote vast tracts of plays that I've not re-read for 20 years.
I also play the piano. Playing that from memory is a herculean effort with hours and hours of repetitive work required to get anything to stick. It also doesn't take very long for me to forget again unless I regularly play through something and I can get sudden blank moments when playing through something that I've played through dozens of times before without a problem. It's also not stress related as it happens regardless of whether I'm playing with someone else listening.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Now that the RIAA has located the parts of the brain where copyrighted music is stored. You can now be assured that no starving record artists will go hungry because evil heartless souls have copied their artistic efforts into their memory and are playing them back without paying.
A government sanctioned brain scan will discover any music stored within the grey matter and charge the owner of said brain the correct licensing fees.
Those unwilling to pay will be directed to sit in the red chair for removal of copyrighted material.
Music/Singing also helps people with a stutter.
This isn't new, and it's been well known for years.
Read the book Musicophilia. There's literally dozens of cases in which people can no longer really communicate or otherwise have some diminished mental capacity, but they respond to music by either singing or playing. That part of the brain seems intact.
Heck, this might even be one of the cases in that book. But he's a professor of neurology, and I believe that was published in 2007.
I don't believe this is a new theory, and it certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated this. Given how long I've known this, I'm surprised this is being touted as a first time we've confirmed this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You mean like Mel Tillis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Tillis
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This is much more prevalent than one guy. Stroke victims who can't talk can often sing. So when they want to say something, they can simply say it to some made-up tune.
Ah! Like Ozzy Osbourne!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
Unless you're advocating labotomising a load of people with the hopes of raising the statistical significance...
Lawyers and Politicians! We've got lots of extras.
We'll even ship them to you.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But it is /. so I'm sure y'all will forgive my divergence from topic at hand.
Music holds a particularly unique place in my life, and this may be the same for others; I can pick a track that I listened to from any period of my life and it literally takes me back to the emotional state I was in during that period of life.
Throw on some Tool or Bush and all I've sudden the "how I felt" in my teen years come flooding back to me.
Throw on some tunes from college, same thing.
It's a fascinating phenomenon and obviously it's all anecdotal. I wouldn't be surprised if it's related to how I listen to music; I'll listen to the same CD for six to eight months at a time and then I'll pick a new one and listen to that one for long period of time.