Latest news with #CarolinePalmer
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The music in us: People found to almost 'become' the songs they hear
Got a rock-and-roll feeling in your bones? When Johnny Cash composed "Get Rhythm" back in 1956, the fabled Country singer wasn't asking a question - he was making a part-exhortation, part-statement about human nature. And going by the findings of a new study published by Nature Reviews Neuroscience, people do indeed have something like a rock-and-roll feeling in their bones. "Music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies become it," said Caroline Palmer, a psychology professor at McGill University in Canada who, with other researchers, looked at the physical impact of listening to music. "Groove" - the ineluctable compulsion to move to the beat - is rooted in human brains, argues the team of researchers with colleagues from the University of Groningen, University of Connecticut, Queen Mary University London and the University of Chicago Illinois. "Our brains and bodies don't just understand music, they physically resonate with it," the team of neuroscientists and psychologists write. The gamut of elements of music - pitch, harmony, melody, tonality, rhythm, metre, groove and affect - these all contribute to people's innate tendency to "anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain–body dynamics physically embody musical structure," the researchers say in their paper. The findings appear to support the validity of neural resonance theory (NRT), the view that "rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain's natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony," according to the team's definition. They said that such "resonance" not only establishes a listener's sense of timing but the experience of "musical pleasure." The resonance described adds to what the researchers described as the "instinct to move with the beat," which can be sometimes inescapable. "Structures like pulse and harmony reflect stable resonant patterns in the brain, shared across people independent of their musical background," the researchers explained. The researchers believe the insights from the study could have an impact beyond music and contribute to the development of "therapeutic tools" for conditions such as stroke, Parkinson's and depression.
Free Malaysia Today
17-05-2025
- Health
- Free Malaysia Today
Experts say our brains are in sync with music
Research suggests that brain rhythms sync with sound to create emotion, movement and meaning. (Envato Elements pic) PARIS : A simple beat, a heady melody, and our body responds instinctively – a foot starts tapping, or we start to sway in time with the beat. So what's going on in our brains? A North American study published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience offers a surprising explanation for this phenomenon. It claims we don't just hear music – our brains and bodies physically resonate with it. Led by Edward Large from the University of Connecticut and Caroline Palmer from McGill University, this study presents a bold hypothesis supporting the idea of neural resonance theory (NRT). Conventional wisdom attributes our taste for music to learned expectations or prediction mechanisms. But NRT suggests that our brain oscillations fall into sync with music. 'This theory suggests that music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies BECOME it,' Palmer explained. According to the researchers, the human brain has its own natural oscillations, which can spontaneously synchronise with musical beats. This phenomenon is thought to affect our perception of rhythm, our enjoyment of music, and our instinctive tendency to move to the beat. Remarkably, this neural resonance is not limited to musicians or seasoned music lovers: it is based on universal mechanisms, independent of experience or musical training. NRT opens up concrete perspectives for potential applications. It could find use in therapeutic tools, for example, particularly for strokes, Parkinson's disease, or depression. It could also enrich research into artificial intelligence to promote more emotionally sensitive interactions between machines and humans, or renew musical teaching methods with tools better adapted to our cerebral rhythms. Above all, this theory sheds new light on a universal phenomenon – that of music's ability to transcend cultures and languages. By suggesting that our brains share common resonance patterns, NRT may reveal part of the origin of our intimate and universal connection to music. These discoveries highlight how music can be more than mere entertainment: it engages our bodies and brains in a much deeper way than we might ever have imagined.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Music Does Something Amazing to Your Brain's Own Natural Rhythms
Ever felt like a song really resonates with you? That may be more true than you think. A new theory suggests that we don't just listen to it; our bodies physically resonate with music, as our brains' natural oscillations synchronize with structures like rhythm and pitch. Music is often thought of as a 'universal language' – people across cultures will bust out similar moves, and young kids will instinctively bop to a beat. According to neural resonance theory, it's not just that we learn to expect and predict what's coming; aspects like harmony in the music we make and enjoy sound so good to us because they're in sync with the brain's resonant patterns. "This theory suggests that music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies become it," says Caroline Palmer, neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada. "That has big implications for therapy, education, and technology." It's not a coincidence, of course. As humans messed around with music over millennia, we figured out what sounds best without necessarily understanding why. Neural resonance theory (NRT) has now been formally described by Palmer and co-authors in a perspective paper reviewing the literature on musical neuroscience. One of the key suggestions of NRT is that neural oscillations synchronize with external audio at different rates. On the slower end of the timescale is what we call rhythm, with distinct beats you can dance or bang a drum to. Neurons in the cortex oscillate at frequencies that resonate with those pulses in the music. Higher frequencies, from about 30 to over 4,000 Hertz, are perceived as pitch. Gamma-frequency oscillations in the cortex sync up with the lower end of that, while the auditory nerve, brain stem, and cochlea resonate at the higher pitches. This all comes together to make music pleasurable regardless of musical background – from young children to classically trained pros. "Statistically universal structures may have arisen in music because they correspond to stable states of complex, pattern-forming dynamical systems," the authors explain. That's not to say that there's no learned factor to appreciating music; the team says that aspects like pulse and more complex structures like meter can vary widely based on culture. Simple pulses, like one you might clap to or bounce a baby on your knee to, develop more quickly and become stronger over time, but more complex structures are culture-specific. Over time, the brain oscillations showed bias towards those learned structures, called attunement. Other aspects covered by NRT include groove, which is basically the urge to move your body to music. When a beat doesn't follow a predictable pulse but falls between pulses to a degree, the brain has to fill in the blanks – which the team calls nonlinear resonance. "High groove ratings" required just the right amount of this nonlinear resonance. Of course, music that's too disjointed isn't groovy enough to dance to either. Understandably, pop music tends to fall right in the middle of that range. The paper also explores how NRT explains various other aspects of music, and what we can learn by applying it to this universal joy. "NRT can provide insights into both neuroscience and human behavior, as well as the link between the two," the researchers write. "Such insights can shed light on the interconnectedness of brain and body, the ability of music to communicate affect and emotion, the role of music in interpersonal bonding, and applications of music to brain health." The perspective was published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The Oldest Evidence of Psychedelics in The Andes Predates The Inca Scientists Reveal What Happens in Your Brain When You Read 'Hugely Significant' Stone Circles in Scotland Suggest Early Human Arrival
Business Mayor
07-05-2025
- Health
- Business Mayor
Study suggests we don't just hear music, but 'become it'
An international study co-authored by McGill psychologist Caroline Palmer suggests our brains and bodies don't just understand music, they physically resonate with it. These discoveries, based on findings in neuroscience, music, and psychology, support Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). NRT maintains that rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain's natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony. This resonance shapes our sense of timing, musical pleasure and the instinct to move with the beat. 'This theory suggests that music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies become it,' said Palmer, Professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill and Director of the Sequence Production Lab. 'That has big implications for therapy, education and technology.' The study's publication in Nature Reviews Neuroscience marks the first time the entire NRT is being published in a single paper, she said. The theory suggests that structures like pulse and harmony reflect stable resonant patterns in the brain, shared across people independent of their musical background. According to NRT, how we hear and produce music can be explained by fundamental dynamical principles of human brain mechanisms that apply from the ear all the way to the spinal cord and limb movements. Researchers say potential applications of the theory include: The study was led by Edward Large (University of Connecticut) and co-authored by Caroline Palmer. The study was funded in part by a Canada Research Chair and a NSERC Discovery Grant. READ SOURCE
