When music stops, brain gets going, study finds

Findings show how brain chops info into manageable pieces

SAN JOSE, Calif. (MCT) — While music may soothe the savage breast, the brain thrills to the sound of silence.

That's a new finding by a team of Stanford and McGill University scientists who watched brain images of 18 volunteers listening to a series of movements within symphonies, each punctuated by frequent pauses.

A one- to two-second break between movements triggers a flurry of mental activity, researchers found. When the music resumes, the action shifts to a different part of the brain, then subsides.

"The pause itself becomes the event," said neuroscientist Vinod Menon of Stanford's School of Medicine, the senior author of a paper published in Thursday's issue of the journal Neuron. "A pause is not a time where nothing happens."

Skillful composers have long used silence to build a sense of anticipation. Some of music's finest moments are spent in transition — waiting, in essence, for the other shoe to drop.

Stanford's snapshots of this pause may have implications beyond concert halls, nightclubs and honky-tonks.

They shine a light into what neuroscientists call "segmentation processes" — the techniques used by the brain to take a stream of sensory information and parcel it up into more easily comprehended pieces.

The same processes are thought to be used in other human senses, such as vision, said Menon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neuroscience. Menon's collaborators include former record producer Daniel J. Levitin, associate professor of psychology and music at McGill; Stanford neuroscientist Devarajan Sridharan, trained in Indian percussion; Jonathan Berger, composer and associate professor of music at Stanford; and Chris Chase, Stanford professor of music.

The literary equivalent could be the period at the end of a sentence, the space after a paragraph or the penultimate chapter in an Agatha Christie mystery. Poetry even has a name for this natural pause or break near the middle of the line: a caesura.

Because our environment delivers a firehose-size torrent of information, "the brain needs to segment or chunk the incoming stimulus stream into meaningful units," Menon said. "The brain needs to extract information about beginnings and endings."

It helps us extract nuggets of important information from a sea of noise, solving the age-old mystery of how we can follow a single conversation at a crowded cocktail party.

Volunteers in the Stanford study laid motionless for nine-minute intervals inside an magnetic resonance imaging machine, an enclosed tube surrounded by a powerful magnet. An MRI shows which parts of the brain are working during mental activity.

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