Neuro Music - A Tour of a Brain on Music

 “Hey! Look!”

“Over there!”

“Oooh… Look!”

“What is it?”

“How should I know?”

“What? You mean THAT?”

“Let’s ask Thy.”

“It’s Thy’s break time – better ask Hypo, he’s in charge tonight.”

“Hyp! Hey Hyp! Over here!” “Help us out Hypothalamus”

“What are all you crazy AP’s going off about? Don’t you know its break time?”

“Gee, Hyp, don’t blame us! We’re voluntary – she’s imagining this whole thing.”

“Right. Well – IT’S DARK! Stop it! You’re throwing off my circadian rhythm!”

“I think they are here for a tour…”

Sometimes my imagination gets the jitters at night. This particular incident that you are witnessing involves the rational for my obsession with music – and the neurological effects of music on education and disabilities. It’s a mouthful, isn’t it? What a crazy profession, music. I happen to be one of those believers who think every child can learn to make music, regardless of anything standing in their way; as a matter of fact, I have had a few things stand in my way. Enough for some folks to think I should not be standing here and enough for others to kindly deem me ‘persistent.’ But, hey! As long as we are here, why not join me for the tour of a brain on music?

“The tour, eh? Gee… well, I guess I could take you on the five-cent look around. Uh-Hmm. First, the introductions. I am Hypothalamus, in charge of the pharmacy and sleep… and a few other things, of course. Not many of us up here have simple jobs; why most of us have entire books – “

“Hyp, I think they are here for the music tour – you know, how music has affected our functions?”

“Right, thank you Glia. Now then, follow me… A few more short introductions while we walk – Neuroglia here works in communications, between synapses that is, along with the AP’s. The Action Potentials you already met. They keep this place bouncing. Glia, do try keeping those AP’s in their place. Somewhere they can’t distract me...”

“Ummm…”

“I know, not your job. Basal Ganglia hasn’t been keeping up with the demand for dopamine and serotonin, so Pre Frontal Cortex is running a little inattentively… along with a few of the other lobes. Well, Glia, we shall just do the best we can, and if I get off topic, just give me a zap.”

“Now that I can do.”

(If Hyp over there has lost you – I have ADD. ‘Inattentive’ does not mean I can’t focus; it means I focus on everything - so things stay pretty interesting around here. Synapses communicate through electrical signals, which neuroglia helps conduct; Glia is well acquainted with shocking intervention.) Hyp, where are we going?

“Glad you asked – the inner ear. No, we’re not ‘hear’ to see the stirrup and anvil – look past the cochlea. 

"See that big bundle of nerves? That is the auditory nerve; if we follow it, it will lead to the auditory processing center in the Temporal Lobe. The Temporal Lobe does the real hearing; the tympanic membrane can vibrate the inner ear bones in perfect synchrony, but until the AP’s travel the nerve synapses to temporal processing, our girl won’t hear a thing. In our case, everyone is doing their job, but the timing is off in processing somewhere. The big name for it is ‘auditory processing delay’ but some folks call it tone-deaf. A long time ago, our timing was way off; processing was so behind on pitch processing that pre-frontal was only getting messages like ‘kinda-high’ or ‘low-ish.’ Now you can hardly tell we have a delay.”

            Hey, Hyp - what changed? Why did the delay get… smaller?

“Why music, of course! ‘Frequency, Intensity and Duration,’ the recipe for neurologic expansion. The music lessons provided frequent stimulation for the auditory nerve, enough for Glia to start producing myelin and get the AP’s moving faster along the synapses. Of course, the intensity from Orchestra class increased the number a AP’s entering processing, and duration has been for – let’s see... four years old at the first lesson and now we are…”

Hyp!

“Oh, pardon me. Well, duration has been almost every day for… a lot of years. With that kind of detailed stimulation, auditory processing started building new pathways to sort out the information. After a while, pre-frontal was getting information detailed enough to attach labels to, like whole steps and intervals. Those pathways helped with language processing, too, helping us sort out sounds in the right order instead of backwards and upside down.”

(Dyslexia is one of the more noticeable ways my ADD manifests itself.)

“Music was just the stimulation temporal processing needed; why, if you really want to make our girl squirm, just play a pitch a quarter tone off from its diatonic buddies! All those years ago, she never would have noticed, and now it’s better than a bug on a bed post. No sir, this temporal processing unit can’t be called tone deaf anymore.  Now then, on to the Optic Nerve.

“The optic nerve is at the back of each eye, but crosses hemispheres before reaching the occipital lobe. Printed information being processed by the occipital center was pretty jumbled up in the beginning, and tracking was a foreign concept to them! Why I remember when the information occipital processing was sending to prefrontal could have been called modern art!”

“ZAP!” (That was Glia)

“Refocus! Once again, music provided the stimulation to help processing build the pathways they needed. Printed music does not change shape for different sounds, like an alphabet; it changes position. In essence, the contour of musical notation draws a picture of sound – ups and downs and jumps. With enough frequency, intensity and duration, occipital processing began connecting pathways with the temporal, and the shapes took on meaning. With sound association in place, left-to-right tracking became smoother. Eventually those pathways made the shift to more abstract sound associations and tracking – reading language. And thank goodness! Some of the skeptics were starting to wonder about us.

“One more stop. Command Central – the Thalamus. From here I wanted you to see the bigger picture, how music has changed our function on a larger scale. Music is one of the few elements of life that affects nearly every part of the voluntary nervous system – and a few of the involuntary nerves, but we won’t see those tonight. I have already shown you the connection between the temporal and occipital lobes. For an instrumental musician, they have been connected to the Parietal Lobe – Sensation Station. The parietal lobe processes the sensations felt in the hands and face, helping the cortex make adjustments in movement when needed. Parietal, Occipital, and Temporal are all connected to the Frontal Lobes. The motor cortex in the frontal lobes use the AP’s from sight, sound and touch to tell our hands (and faces of wind players) how and when to move. And let’s not forget the emotions expressed through music; those are provided by a network in the temporal lobe - the amygdala to be precise. The sequence of these connections is recorded in the cerebellum as a skill.

“Each lobe of the brain is connected to all the others. But for a musician, these connections happen simultaneously - in every part of the brain; frequently, intensely and for the duration of every practice session. Frequency, intensity, and duration, you will remember, are the recipe for building new pathways, strengthening and accelerating them. Each time a musician plays a note, the thalamus goes crazy relaying the messages that come from literally every direction. The thalamus of a musician gives new meaning to the concept of multi-tasking. When our girl plays music, these pathways light up with AP's brighter than a Fourth of July night sky. And that’s only the voluntary crew!

“The best part of all – I see you yawning, Miss ‘I don’t need a circadian rhythm’… right, back on track – is that all those interconnected and accelerated pathways support learning, memory, skill development, coordination, and information retrieval in every other discipline of life. The more pathways we build up here, the faster we can build another one. 

“Well, there you are. That’s my version of the music tour. Now go to bed! And your reader friend too. Before I call in the Pituitary Squad!”

~~~~~~

There it is – if I were to give up music now, I would be leaving behind the stimulation that built my white matter… and made me who I am. Music makes the brain a better place, and it gives the world a little more beauty – it expresses the beauty that should be. Music can be therapy, for learning disabilities, developmental delays, and so many other possibilities. Yes, every child can learn to make music and benefit from learning it. Maybe I’m in this crazy profession so a few children more can make some musical connections. 

For a well done video on this topic, check out this Ted-Ed Video