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Is Language Built on Song| old_uid | 1604 |
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| title | Is Language Built on Song |
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| start_date | 2006/10/11 |
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| schedule | 16h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Recent experimental findings suggest that during child development musical communication precedes language, and language areas in the brain have been shown to form a subset of those concerned with music. For music, areas in both cerebral hemispheres are often engaged, while language tasks usually activate predominantly left-hemisphere regions. A recent fMRI study compares brain responses to hearing familiar songs with those to hearing spoken versions of the same songs by the same speakers. This confirms the extensive overlap between song and speech, and reveals auditory-motor template areas involved in detecting consonance. Tonal sequences of notes appear to have a special importance, both for infant music perception and for brain activation in adult hearers. It will be argued that the structures of tonal music, the prerequisite of musical harmony, which have an intrinsic connection to how we hear and produce sound, shape our brains and provide templates within our brains for structuring sound so that it can become meaningful for us in the form of language.
Robert Turner, a physicist, anthropologist and mathematician by training, worked as a Lecturer in Physics at Nottingham University from 1984-88, collaborating with the Nobel Prize winning Sir Peter Mansfield on the development of ultra-fast echo planar MRI (EPI) and design of MRI gradient coils. Pursuing his interest in using MRI to study brain function, he took a position as Visiting Scientist, NIH, in the USA in 1988, and pioneered Diffusion Weighted EPI, now used widely in stroke research, and Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) functional MRI at the high magnetic field of 4 T in humans. He returned to England in 1994 to help establish in London the world's first purpose-built lab for the study of human brain function with MRI. He is now a research professor in the Functional Imaging Laboratory and the High Field MR Research Laboratory, University College London, optimizing BOLD fMRI and other MRI techniques for neuroscience. His interest in music is personal as well as professional, and he has established a Music and Brain Club that meets several times per term in his laboratory in Queen Square, London. |
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| responsibles | Bishop |
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