A new study throws some light on how musical aptitude can offset one very specific aspect of the aging process. In research comparing older patients with musical training to those without, older people who’d spent time regularly practicing or teaching music consistently displayed much faster neural reaction times to certain kinds of sounds. The idea [...]
Posts Tagged ‘music’
Musical Learning
January 30th, 2012 
The Connectome 
Posted in Brain News 
Tags: aging, autism, learning, music, neurophysiology, schizophrenia 
1 Comment »The Colors, Man! The Colors!
December 21st, 2011 The Connectome Scientists have discovered direct neural correlates of synesthesia, a new study reports. Not only have they detected activation patterns corresponding to synesthesic activity (such as “seeing” certain colors when thinking of certain numbers or sounds) – they’ve isolated an actual functional difference in the brains of synesthesic people. And what’s more, they’ve discovered a way to crank [...]
Posted in Brain News Tags: music, neurophysiology, psychology, senses, synesthesia, technology, vision No Comments »The Brain Lab Tour
December 6th, 2011 The Connectome This past weekend, I got to visit one of the coolest places I’ve ever seen: the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI). So just for today, I’m gonna take a break from news reporting, and tell you a little about what goes on inside an actual cutting-edge neuroscience lab. Sound good? OK, let’s go! I’m [...]
Musical Matchups
November 28th, 2011 The Connectome Our brains process music via different sensory pathways depending on what we think its source is, a new study finds. As our brains organize information from our senses into a coherent representation of the world around us, they’re constantly hard at work associating data from one sense – say, sight – with data from another – say, hearing. A [...]
Posted in Brain News Tags: fMRI, hearing, music, neurophysiology, senses, touch, vision No Comments »
