Wired for Music
Music has a bizarre power to engage and affect us – to move us emotionally or literally, whether it’s foot-tapping, finger-drumming or booty-shaking. It seems to have properties that make it automatically and powerfully salient for human beings. An obvious question is whether this reflects some innate properties of the human brain or whether it emerges over time due to experience with types of music. Put another way, does the brain shape the music or the other way around? Does music show particular structures because those are inherently salient and pleasant to humans or is this reaction caused by the brain’s tendency to specialise in processing stimuli that occur with some statistical regularity in its environment? A new study by Perani and colleagues demonstrates very convincingly that the human newborn brain already shows strong functional specialisation for music processing. By performing functional magnetic resonance imaging on newborns, all under 3 days old, they foun...