LONDON: Does the brain process lyrics and melody separately or as one? Well scientists claim to have finally found an answer to the hotly debated question.
A team at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany has found that the brain first deals with music and lyrics together and then, after passing through more complex processing, like understanding what lyrics mean, the two are treated separately.
The scientists studied a functional MRI brain scan of people listening to songs to make the discovery.
The team knew that when neurons process the same stimulus repeatedly, their response to it decreases over time.
They reasoned that if they varied just the tune and kept the lyrics the same, areas showing a decline in activity must be processing lyrics.
And if they varied just the lyrics, areas showing a decline must be processing the tune, while any regions declining when both the tune and lyrics are repeated must be processing both.
The team wrote four different sets of six songs and played these to 12 volunteers while scanning their brains.
In one set, all songs had different melodies and lyrics. In another, the melodies were different but lyrics were the same, while in the third set, the opposite was true. The fourth set were identical to each other.
The scientists worked out that one particular part of the brain — the superior temporal sulcus — was responding to the songs.
In the middle of the STS, the lyrics and tune were being processed as a single signal. But in anterior STS only the lyrics were processed.
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