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Musicians often say that they capture musical harmony in everything that surrounds them. An experiment conducted by American psychologists explains what goes on in a musician’s head and helps us understand how we interpret what we see and hear.
Musicians not only hear harmonies, but also find structures in the surrounding world that correlate with music. In an experiment by psychologists at Vanderbilt University (USA), volunteers, among whom were professional musicians, were shown moving images, different for each eye. In one case, these were random figures and icons, in the other, notes on a stave. Psychologists recorded when the participants distinguished figures, and when they distinguished notes. When music was played in the background during the experiment, the brains of the participants were more likely to focus on the notes. However, in the case of musicians, this “homing” occurred when the segment of notes coincided with the melody being played.1
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- What kind of music helps us think?
“Our brain is so efficient at coordinating information from outside that it seems to be automatic,” says Randolph Blake, one of the study’s lead authors. — In fact, the brain works more like a detective who constantly uses clues, trying to figure out what we are actually seeing. Therefore, we tend to see first of all what we expect to see, based on past experience. When we see a flash of light and hear two beeps at the same time, one after the other, the brain thinks that there were actually two flashes.” For musicians, this cue is a melody that activates areas in their brain associated with the perception of harmonic structures and their musical notation.
According to evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, professor at University College London, music lessons initially contributed to the development of a more complex organization of thinking in humans. “Our brain is constantly trying to create order out of disorder, and music gives it an amazing opportunity to play with different units of meaning,” explains Jeffrey Miller. – We extract from our culture (consciously and intuitively) ideas about musical structures, tones and other ways of understanding music; and our brain develops trying to pick out different patterns (regularities) in musical works. Recognition is critical to making sense of the world around us, says mathematician Keith Devlin in The Mathematical Gene2. It is this ability, he believes, that underlies the ability to think logically, classify objects and combine them into categories. Thus, music lessons not only educate our taste and sense of beauty, but also train our thinking.
1 M. Lee, R. Blake, S. Kim, C. Kim «Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music». PNAS, онлайн-публикация от 14 мая 2015 года.
2 K. Devlin «The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved And Why Numbers Are Like Gossip» (Basic Books, 2001)