Why Some Ditties Stick in Your Head
Dec. 13 -- What makes a song like "Jingle Bells" stick in your head, and why does a wrongly played note sound so jarring?
New research suggests the brain has and develops structures designed to perceive musical patterns and then remember them.
Although the brain appears to tap several areas to hear music, the study determined its musical ear, so to speak, is made up of set circuits, many of which connect to the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, a region located just behind the forehead.
It's the existence of these circuits that gives people their innate sense of melody (some more than others) and why familiar musical harmonics and ditties like "Jingle Bells" can literally become branded in the brain.
"As a piece of music fulfills or violates our expectations, it moves around in this space. And it's this violation of expectations that drives our underlying response to music," said Petr Janata, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in Hanover, N.H., and author of the study appearing in the journal Science.
"So if we're hearing a lot of things we're not expecting to hear, it sounds unpleasant. But if we're never surprised, it can start to sound simple."
Watching Brains Listen
To map the brain's response to music, Janata and colleagues had eight students with musical experience listen to a piece of originally composed music while a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner snapped detailed pictures of their brains. The eight-minute melody was composed by a Dartmouth graduate, Jeffrey Birk, who designed the tune to move through all 24 major and minor keys.
As the students listened to the music, Janata had them perform two simple tasks. He noted their brain activity as they performed the tasks and used them as markers to detect how their brains were responding to key changes in the music.
Janata found that while several areas of the brain lighted up as the students listened, only the rostromedial prefrontal cortex regularly tracked fluctuations in the music. This suggested that this area is where the brain maintains maps of melodies.
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