{"id":3989,"date":"2014-01-24T06:33:33","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T06:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/skylight.gr\/administrator_wordpress\/index.php\/2014\/01\/24\/how-scientists-recorded-the-music-inside-one-womans-head\/"},"modified":"2014-01-24T06:33:33","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T06:33:33","slug":"how-scientists-recorded-the-music-inside-one-womans-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/2014\/01\/24\/how-scientists-recorded-the-music-inside-one-womans-head\/","title":{"rendered":"How Scientists Recorded the Music Inside One Woman’s Head"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n


We’ve all gotten songs stuck in our heads. \u201cEarworms,\u201d as they\u2019re\u00a0called, can drive a person crazy. But they\u2019re almost always of a song you\u2019ve heard recently\u00a0or conjured from memory. For some people, however, the music in their head isn\u2019t quite like that. Instead, it\u2019s a hallucination.\u00a0The\u00a0scores and tunes can\u00a0stay with them constantly\u2014music that only one person will ever hear. <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

But now\u00a0researchers have managed to record<\/a> the internal melody of one patient.\u00a0Helen Thompson at New Scientist reports<\/a> on the case of Sylvia,\u00a0a woman who lost her hearing eleven years ago\u00a0and then began to hear internal music. Luckily, as Thompson reports, Sylvia was a musician with perfect pitch. So she began to write down the notes that appeared in her head. This is, naturally, fascinating to neuroscientists. Thompson writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

She discovered that playing real music suppressed her musical hallucinations. This enabled Timothy Griffiths<\/a> at Newcastle University, UK, and his colleagues to study what was going on in her brain while switching her hallucinations on and off.<\/p>\n

Passages from J. S. Bach worked as the “masker” to switch the hallucinations off. Sylvia rated the intensity of her hallucinations every 15 seconds throughout the study, which lasted about 45 minutes. At the time of the experiment, her musical hallucinations happened to consist of sequences from Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical HMS Pinafore<\/a>. Immediately following the masker, her hallucinations were at their lowest, gradually increasing until the start of the next excerpt.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By watching Syvlia\u2019s brain while she turned on and off these musical hallucinations, researchers were able to pinpoint where they might be coming from. And it\u00a0looked\u00a0like her internal music was coming\u00a0from a handful of brain regions\u2014the ones that process melodies as well as those implicated in memory and processing images.<\/p>\n

In people with normal hearing, Thompson explains,\u00a0as a sound comes in, the brain tries to predict what might come next. If it\u2019s right, you can process immediately. If you\u2019re wrong, the signal goes through the lower brain regions and corrects the high level prediction. This allows you to process sounds quickly. But since Sylvia doesn\u2019t hear anything, her brain never corrects the incorrect predications, and thus hallucinates.<\/p>\n

If this all sounds totally irritating, it is. “Sometimes a tune will play itself 1000 times in my head and become really annoying,\u201d Sylvia told Thompson. \u201cI have learned to live with it but I can see how one could be driven mad.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Source: http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve all gotten songs stuck in our heads. \u201cEarworms,\u201d as they\u2019re\u00a0called, can drive a person…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}