Imagining a song triggers brain activity similar to moments of silence in the midst of music – sciencedaily

The findings collectively reveal how the brain continues to respond to music, even when none are playing, and provide new insight into how human sensory predictions work.

Music is more than a sensory experience

When we listen to music, the brain tries to predict what will come next. A surprise, such as a loud note or a disharmonious chord, increases brain activity.

To isolate the brain’s predictive signal from the signal produced in response to actual sensory experience, the researchers used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure musicians’ brain activity as they listened to or imagined Bach’s piano melodies. .

When imagining music, musicians’ brain activity had the opposite electrical polarity to that when listening to it – indicating different brain activations – but the same type of activity as for imaging occurred in moments. silent songs where people would have expected a note but there wasn’t.

Explaining the importance of the results, Giovanni Di Liberto, assistant professor of intelligent systems at Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics, said:

“There is no sensory input during silence and imaginary music, so the neural activity that we discovered comes only from the predictions of the brain, for example the internal model of the music of the brain. Even though the intervals of silent times have no input sound, we found consistent patterns of neural activity in these intervals, indicating that the brain responds to both notes and silences in music.

“Ultimately, this underlines that music is more than a sensory experience for the brain because it engages the brain in an ongoing attempt to predict upcoming musical events. Our study isolated neural activity produced by this process. And our results suggest that such prediction processes underlie both music listening and imagery.

“We used music listening in these studies to investigate brain mechanisms of sound processing and sensory prediction, but these curious findings have broader implications – from improving our basic scientific understanding to applied parameters such as clinical research.

“For example, imagine a cognitive assessment protocol involving listening to music. From a few minutes of EEG recordings while listening to music, we could derive several useful cognitive indicators, as music engages a variety of functions. cerebral, sensory and prediction processes to emotions. Also, consider listening to music much more enjoyable than existing tasks. “

This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council. Professor Di Liberto carried out the work while doing postdoctoral fellowships at ENS Paris and Trinity, with Professor Shihab Shamma (University of Maryland and ENS Paris) and his student M. Guilhem Marion (ENS Paris).

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