LJWorld.com / Research: Brain gets going when music stops

Archive for Friday, August 3, 2007

August 3, 2007

California — While music may soothe the savage beast, 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 in Thursday’s issue of the journal Neuron. “A pause is not a time where nothing happens.”

Stanford’s snapshots of this pause 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.