Earth & Sky

Ani Patel’s homepage

When people listen to music, says Patel, they’re activating areas of the brain that were traditionally thought to be just language areas. Using a technique called magnetic encephalography – MEG – that measures the fine timing of brain activity, Patel is finding that the brain also processes the rhythmic structure of music and language in similar ways.

At The Neurosciences Institute, a whole building is dedicated to the study of music and the brain. Patel has been there about seven years.

The work at the Neurosciences Institute is privately funded by foundations and individuals.

More with Dr. Patel:

I’ve always been passionate about both those things, and I’m very lucky to be able to study something where I get to combine those interests. One of the neat things about the study of music and the brain is that…in our society we tend to pigeonhole people as being either scientists or artists…but of course there are plenty of people out there who have interests in both and studying music and the brain is actually one of the ways you can indulge both of those interests, and I get to do that on a daily basis. I feel very fortunate.

One of the things that I’ve been very interested in is the relationship between language and music. The conventional wisdom has been that those are very different –brain functions – you might hear that language is a left–brain thing and music is a right–brain thing, but we’re learning that that’s highly oversimplified. And that both language and music use both sides of your brain though not in completely the same way and you can actually use them as kind of foils for each other to understand better how the brain processes both language and music.

.... When we speak, our voice pitch goes up and down and … melody and rhythm aren’t completely unique to music – they also occur in language…

... And so it seems that parts of the brain involved in following the melody of music overlap in part with some of the parts involved in following the melody of language

There’s actually some overlap…when people are listening to music they’re activating areas of the brain that were traditionally thought to be just language areas…which opens up interesting questions about how much of the brain is truly specialized for language as opposed to more general cognitive skills, or whether music is actually using some of the language areas of the brain to do its processing. Those are fascinating questions.

We’re basically starting to discover that there’s a lot more relationship than people had previously believed – for example in the way the brain processes the structure of music and language, which you might call their syntax – in terms of the rhythmic structures of the two types of domains, in terms of these overlapping disorders where … what looks like a specifically musical problem actually turns out to have implications for language processing. So it seems like there is a lot more overlap between music and language that has been previously believed, and even more interesting than that to me is that using them together, studying them in parallel, using one as foil for the other gives you new ways of studying the brain and getting insights into how each of them works inside the brain.

...There’s actually implications for what I do for thinking of better ways to design therapies for people with brain damage that suffer from language disorders, for developing new techniques for how the brain processes patterns in time, which could be relevant to early diagnoses of certain disorders …so the fact that they have a lot more similarity than is commonly believed means that discoveries that you make in one domain may have implications for how you treat or diagnose problems in the other domain. And there a lot of people out there who care a lot about being able to treat or diagnose language disorders, so knowing about the relationship to music means that it will open up…novel ways to treat and diagnose language disorders

Or at a more general level, lets say we use music to develop some new technique of studying brain activity…that technique is not necessarily tied to just musical studies…if I develop a technique through a study I’ve been doing of music and language that looks like a promising new way of studying brain activity, I can turn around an apply it to purely language issues, and that’s happened already in my work…so…there’s a lot of crossover in terms of what you learn in one area of the brain in terms of what you maybe can do to apply it to another

One of the most satisfying things for me have been some of the techniques we’ve developing studying music and the brain seem to promising for studying more general aspects of perception and perhaps… diagnosing things about auditory processing disorders or studying the mechanisms of those disorders.

E&S: You said that as far as we know, humans are the only species to make music.

We use the term song for some of the vocal displays of other animals, like birds, of course, and whales, and some primates even, gibbons, but what we do seems to be very different from what other animals do when they sing. Animal singing is typically tied to reproduction, it’s quite often only done by the male of the species – that’s the case with the bulk of the birds, at certain times of year, it’s related to certain hormonal and brain changes and to defending territory and seeking mates 5.01 whereas human song is of course highly flexible, made in all kinds of contexts, by both men and women, boys and girls, doesn’t seem to be specifically tied to any one function, seems to play a role of different functions in our society in different cultures of the world

E&S: For your research, how do you define music?

My definition of music…well, I think music is basically…. it’s sound that’s organized for aesthetic purposes and perceived for aesthetic reasons, and you see tremendous diversity in what counts as music worldwide. Certainly even in our culture you hear people say ‘Oh, that’s not music’ ...like if it’s somebody, a classical buff, and they hear rock music, they say ‘oh that’s not even music’ so everybody’s definition of music is slightly different, but I think the main thing is that music is sound that is appreciated from an aesthetic standpoint and organized from an aesthetic standpoint. The kinds of music I work on are pretty conventional things that you would consider music, western European classical music

A couple of the projects I’ve been involved with are, one, dealing with these interesting individuals who have brain damage and then seem to suffer from selective music perception problems. You may have heard of aphasia, which is a language problem after brain damage that’s due to central brain damage difficulty in organizing and putting together sentences or understanding them… well, there’s another type of disorder called amusia which is when somebody has brain damage and suddenly their perception of music is radically different, although they seem normal in other ways and this has been very interesting to people who study music and the brain because it’s given us some idea of what parts of the brain are involved in music.

That is kind of a complementary technique to MRI. MRI is better known, and it gives you those lovely pictures of the brain with the hot spots that light up when people do different tasks. But it has very limited temporal resolution. It doesn’t really measure the fine timing of brain activity in different regions, it just sort of tells you there’s more activity here or there. And we’re very interested in the timing of activity. The details of what the neurons are saying, so to speak.

For example, some of the techniques we used to study brain activity in time inspired by the study of musical melody, but now we’re turning around and using it to study tinnitus.

As you know, there’s really no effective treatment for tinnitus, probably because we don’t understand the brain mechanisms involved. Some of these MEG techniques that we’ve developed by studying melodies, we think might open up new ways of understanding tinnitus and studying its correlates as a disorder of cortical timing, One of our hypotheses is that part of what’s wrong is that temporal pattern of activity in the auditory cortex has become disorganized – and it’s very hard to measure something like that with fMRI, but we think we might be able to do that with MEG.

Our thanks to:

Aniruddh D. Patel, Ph.D.
Esther J. Burnham Fellow
The Neurosciences Institute
San Diego, CA