Neuroscientists analyzed the brain activity of 29 volunteers while they listened to Pink Floyd. Then, they assembled auditory spectrograms into a recognizable reproduction of what the patients had heard, making some of the vocals clear. Researchers aimed to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients with neurological...
People who physically respond to music with chills have stronger fiber connections between the auditory cortex and emotional processing areas in the brain.
"Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they...
Night owls aren't lazy. They're built different....
Big data seems to be the answer and the thing everyone turns to today, but should we? Joachim Vosgerau gave an excellent talk a while ago on the biases that show up when working with it. "Vosgerau showed that if one collects data in a non-representative way, it can lead to high levels of confidence in an extremely biased and...
A recent study reveals how different brain areas are activated when processing music and language....
Do we only hear sounds? Or can we also hear silence? These questions are the subject of a centuries-old philosophical debate between two camps: the perceptual view (we literally hear silence), and the cognitive view (we only judge or infer silence). Here, we take an empirical approach to resolve this theoretical controversy. We...
Inside the incredible science of using music to restore the memories of people with dementia.
"In this study, we show that sensorimotor synchronization to music significantly amplifies the pain-reducing effects of music listening. Using pressure algometry to the fingernails, pain stimuli were delivered to n = 59 healthy adults either during music listening or silence, while either performing an active tapping task or a...
