Music And Meaning In The Brain

Stefan Koelsch and colleagues took advantage of a neural signature of 'semantic priming' -- the ability of a sentence to activate representations of related words in the brain. Reading a sentence, such as 'The boat floats on a lake', followed by an unrelated word, like 'needle', causes an electrical response of the brain known as the N400 potential that is evoked by semantic incongruity. In the new study, the authors first showed that brief passages of classical music are reliably associated with the same words by different subjects. They then showed that music-word pairings judged incongruent in the behavioral experiment evoked N400 potentials in the brain. Because this potential is thought to be specific to semantic meaning, not violations of expectation in general, the authors conclude that music can convey concepts, not simply emotion.

Petr Janata discusses this work in an accompanying News and Views article.

Author contact:

Stefan Koelsch
Max Planck Institute for Neuropsychology
Leipzig, Germany
Tel: +49 341 9940 121
E-mail: mail@stefan-koelsch.de

News and Views author contact:

Petr Janata
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH
USA
Tel: +1 603 646 0062
E-mail: petr.janata@dartmouth.edu

Also available online.

(C) Nature Neuroscience press release.

Message posted by: Trevor M. D'Souza