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<\/a>Do monkeys appreciate music? Researchers compared fMRI brain scans of macaque monkeys and humans to find the answer.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
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Brain Scans Show How Monkeys Process Music<\/strong><\/p>\n New Hampshire Public Radio<\/em> (NHPR) revealed this intriguing finding in this interview<\/a> with Bevil Conway<\/a>, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and\u00a0Sam Norman-Haignere<\/a>, now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University.\u00a0 What sounds like music to humans may just be noise to a macaque monkey.<\/p>\n Humans and monkeys are nearly identical when it comes to processing visual information. As such, it was surprising to see these differences in audio perception.\u00a0 The finding suggests that while humans have developed brain areas that are sensitive to pitch and tone, which help process sounds associated with music, monkeys do not.<\/p>\n Norman-Haignere says: \u201cBoth speech and music are highly complex, structured sounds. And it’s totally plausible that the brain has developed regions that are highly tuned to those structures. It’s plausible that there’s something in our genetic code that causes those regions to develop the way they are and to be located where they are. Or it could be that these brain regions develop as children listen to music and speech.\u201d<\/p>\n This differentiator between humans and monkeys, and humans\u2019 ability to detect subtle changes in pitch and tone are critical for conveying and perceiving emotion.\u00a0 It allows humans to interpret emotion simply by hearing changes in a person\u2019s tone.<\/p>\n Non-invasive fMRI Analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n A prior study conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Norman-Haignere contributed to, had devised a new approach to brain imaging. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music \u2014 any music. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener\u2019s auditory cortex will fire in response. Other sounds, by contrast \u2014 a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing \u2014 left the musical circuits unmoved.\u00a0 These results were reported in the journal Neuron<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An MRI scan of a person listening to music shows brain areas that respond. Image Credit: Kul Bhatia\/Science Source<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For the new research, Conway, Norman-Haignere and several colleagues used fMRI to monitor the brains of six people and five macaque monkeys as they listened to a range of sounds through headphones.<\/p>\n fMRI is a non-invasive technique for imaging the activation of brain areas by different types of physical sensations, such as sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.\u00a0 fMRI\u00a0scans use the same basic principles as\u00a0MRI\u00a0scans but scan for metabolic activity, while MRI scans create images of anatomical structures.<\/p>\n Some of the sounds were more like music, where changes in pitch are obvious.\u00a0 In humans, the scans reveal a very clear response, while in monkeys the scans showed no such response.<\/p>\n MATLAB<\/a> was used in the generalized linear model regression analysis and corresponding permutation tests.\u00a0 To learn more, you can find the general-purpose code for fMRI analysis on GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Component Correlations with Acoustic Measures. Image Credit: Norman-Haignere et al.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This research shows an important difference between humans\u2019 and monkeys\u2019 ability to enjoy music.\u00a0 Humans showed brain regions with a strong preference for harmonic sounds compared to noise. The monkeys did not.<\/p>\n It seems that monkeys won\u2019t be enjoying Tchaikovsky anytime soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week\u2019s blog post was written by guest blogger, Liz Ashforth. This time, Liz discovered research in the neuroscience field that sheds light on how different primate brains, including humans,… read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2400"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2406,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions\/2406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/headlines\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mediad.publicbroadcasting.net\/p\/shared\/npr\/styles\/placed_wide\/nprshared\/201906\/731400718.jpg\")
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