Functional brain imaging picked up signals suggesting that some neu rons were specialized to detect only music - but the broad map of brain activity generated by an fMRI couldn’t pinpoint those cells. They first became clued in to these music-sensitive cells when they asked volunteers to listen to a diverse panel of sounds inside an MRI scanner. That conclusion is based on her team’s 2015 discovery of neurons in the human brain that respond only to music. “It’s very sensible to think that there might be common machinery,” she says. It makes sense, Kanwisher says: music and language are both complex, uniquely human ways of communi cating. To appreciate song, they’ve pro posed, we draw on parts of the brain dedicated to speech and language. Some biologists and anthropologists have reasoned that since there’s no clear evolutionary advantage for humans’ unique ability to create and respond to music, these abilities must have emerged when humans began to repurpose other brain functions. This has been a puzzle for centuries.” MIT neuroscientist and McGovern Investigator Nancy Kanwisher. And nobody knows why humans have music at all. No other animals have music in the way that humans do. “Every human society that’s been studied has music. Recent results from cognitive neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher’s lab have left her pondering the role of music in human evolution. This story originally appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of BrainScan. Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research.
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