Brainmap: Using Music as a Window and a Tool for the Brain

Pysche Loui, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University
 
Music is a fundamentally human activity that is celebrated worldwide and from a young age, but why we know and love music has remained a mystery. I will describe behavioral, structural and functional neuroimaging (MRI, DTI, fMRI using graph theory approaches), and brain-stimulation (tDCS) studies that use music as a model to understand the interaction of multiple systems in the human brain, and to apply our knowledge of these systems towards neurological disorders. Results suggest that much of what we know and love about music is learned from statistics of sounds in the environment, and that structural and functional connectivity among perceptual, motor, and cognitive systems subserve the musical experiences that may overlap in different extents with language, creativity, abstract reasoning, and affective communication. Capitalizing on these findings, I will also describe applications of music cognition towards neurological disorders characterized by disordered neural activity.