One of the many reasons for our ‘big brain’ is our
ability to talk to each other and this goes along with our other human
abilities such as processing complicate arithmetic problems - even if we get
them wrong, or playing music. So do we have a chunk of our brain devoted to
these high-level functions or does the big chunk of grey matter multi task as
necessary?
This debate has been going on a long time, but now
Fedorenko et al from M.I.T have
published the answer to the problem (1). They stuffed 48 participants into the
big magnet, one at a time, of course, and talked their ear off as well as
playing them nice music and scrambled music.
The fMRI scans lit up in quite different regions
when listening to speech than when listening to music. The speech regions lit
up most strongly when sentences were used. They are located high and a little
way forward of center of the hemispheres, so hitting your spouse on the head
with a skillet won’t help their understanding of what you are telling them.
Musically, we are working the little grey cells
halfway down above your ears. No mention was made of the response of the
candidate’s scans to an operatic aria followed by hip hop, but it’s nice to get
one controversy settled.
