Breaking (musical) boundaries by investigating brain dynamics of event segmentation during real-life music-listening.

The perception of musical phrase boundaries is a critical aspect of human musical experience: It allows us to organize, understand, derive pleasure from, and remember music. Identifying boundaries is a prerequisite for segmenting music into meaningful chunks, facilitating efficient processing and storage while providing an enjoyable, fulfilling listening experience through the anticipation of upcoming musical events. Expanding on Sridharan et al.

Personal and contextual variables predict music consumption during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Canada.

The global COVID-19 lockdowns shattered familiar routines, plunging individuals into a disorienting emotional landscape characterized by loss, uncertainty, and a deep yearning for social bonds. Many employed coping strategies such as cleaning, dancing, and mindfulness-based practices to ameliorate negative emotions. Music listening was one of the most widely used coping strategies, moderated by personal and contextual variables.

Shifting the sociometer: opioid receptor blockade lowers self-esteem.

Given the evolutionary importance of social ties for survival, humans are thought to have evolved psychobiological mechanisms to monitor and safeguard the status of their social bonds. At the psychological level, self-esteem is proposed to function as a gauge-'sociometer'-reflecting one's social belongingness status. At the biological level, endogenous opioids appear to be an important substrate for the hedonic signalling needed to regulate social behaviour.

1/f laws found in non-human music.

A compelling question at the intersection of physics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology concerns the extent to which the brains of various species evolved to encode regularities of the physical world. It would be parsimonious and adaptive, for example, for brains to evolve an innate understanding of gravity and the laws of motion, and to be able to detect, auditorily, those patterns of noises that ambulatory creatures make when moving about the world. One such physical regularity of the world is fractal structure, generally characterized by power-law correlations or 1/f spectral distributions.

The disintegrated theory of consciousness: Sleep, waking, and meta-awareness.

The study of sleep and wakefulness can inform debates about the nature of consciousness. We argue that sleep and wakefulness fall along a multidimensional continuum and that inconsistencies and paradoxes with the accounts put forth by Merker et al. and Tononi can be understood in terms of a pervasive false dichotomy between these two states.

Knowledge songs as an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate information transmission through music.

I propose an adjunct to the two models presented in the target articles, a function of music that is ubiquitous and would have solved a clear adaptive problem, that of transmitting important survival information among pre-literate humans. This class of knowledge songs uniquely preserved cultural, botanical, medical, safety, and practical information that increased the adaptive fitness of societies.

Towards an Understanding of Control of Complex Rhythmical "Wavelike" Coordination in Humans.

How does the human neurophysiological system self-organize to achieve optimal phase relationships among joints and limbs, such as in the composite rhythms of butterfly and front crawl swimming, drumming, or dancing? We conducted a systematic review of literature relating to central nervous system (CNS) control of phase among joint/limbs in continuous rhythmic activities. SCOPUS and Web of Science were searched using keywords "Phase AND Rhythm AND Coordination". This yielded 1039 matches from which 23 papers were extracted for inclusion based on screening criteria.

Fluency misattribution and auditory hindsight bias.

We conducted three experiments to test the fluency-misattribution account of auditory hindsight bias. According to this account, prior exposure to a clearly presented auditory stimulus produces fluent (improved) processing of a distorted version of that stimulus, which results in participants mistakenly rating that item as easy to identify. In all experiments, participants in an exposure phase heard clearly spoken words zero, one, three, or six times.

The Psychology of Music: Rhythm and Movement.

The urge to move to music is universal among humans. Unlike visual art, which is manifest across space, music is manifest across time. When listeners get carried away by the music, either through movement (such as dancing) or through reverie (such as trance), it is usually the temporal qualities of the music-its pulse, tempo, and rhythmic patterns-that put them in this state.

Anhedonia to music and mu-opioids: Evidence from the administration of naltrexone.

Music's universality and its ability to deeply affect emotions suggest an evolutionary origin. Previous investigators have found that naltrexone (NTX), a μ-opioid antagonist, may induce reversible anhedonia, attenuating both positive and negative emotions. The neurochemical basis of musical experience is not well-understood, and the NTX-induced anhedonia hypothesis has not been tested with music.

Measuring the representational space of music with fMRI: a case study with Sting.

Functional brain imaging has revealed much about the neuroanatomical substrates of higher cognition, including music, language, learning, and memory. The technique lends itself to studying of groups of individuals. In contrast, the nature of expert performance is typically studied through the examination of exceptional individuals using behavioral case studies and retrospective biography.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy for neuroimaging in cochlear implant recipients.

Functional neuroimaging can provide insight into the neurobiological factors that contribute to the variations in individual hearing outcomes following cochlear implantation. To date, measuring neural activity within the auditory cortex of cochlear implant (CI) recipients has been challenging, primarily because the use of traditional neuroimaging techniques is limited in people with CIs. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging technology that offers benefits in this population because it is non-invasive, compatible with CI devices, and not subject to electrical artifacts.

Bach Is the Father of Harmony: Revealed by a 1/f Fluctuation Analysis across Musical Genres.

Harmony is a fundamental attribute of music. Close connections exist between music and mathematics since both pursue harmony and unity. In music, the consonance of notes played simultaneously partly determines our perception of harmony; associates with aesthetic responses; and influences the emotion expression.

Reducing social stress elicits emotional contagion of pain in mouse and human strangers.

Empathy for another's physical pain has been demonstrated in humans [1] and mice [2]; in both species, empathy is stronger between familiars. Stress levels in stranger dyads are higher than in cagemate dyads or isolated mice [2, 3], suggesting that stress might be responsible for the absence of empathy for the pain of strangers. We show here that blockade of glucocorticoid synthesis or receptors for adrenal stress hormones elicits the expression of emotional contagion (a form of empathy) in strangers of both species.

Musicality Correlates With Sociability and Emotionality in Williams Syndrome.

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a neurogenetic developmental disorder characterized by peaks and valleys of cognitive abilities. One peak that has been understudied is the affinity that many individuals with WS have toward music. It remains unknown whether their high levels of musical interest, skill and expressivity are related to their sociable personality or their verbal intelligence.

Trait anhedonia is associated with reduced reactivity and connectivity of mesolimbic and paralimbic reward pathways.

Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasant stimuli. Although anhedonia is a prominent feature of many psychiatric disorders, trait anhedonia is also observed dimensionally in healthy individuals. Currently, the neurobiological basis of anhedonia is poorly understood because it has been mainly investigated in patients with psychiatric disorders.

Inter-subject synchronization of brain responses during natural music listening.

Music is a cultural universal and a rich part of the human experience. However, little is known about common brain systems that support the processing and integration of extended, naturalistic 'real-world' music stimuli. We examined this question by presenting extended excerpts of symphonic music, and two pseudomusical stimuli in which the temporal and spectral structure of the Natural Music condition were disrupted, to non-musician participants undergoing functional brain imaging and analysing synchronized spatiotemporal activity patterns between listeners.

The neurochemistry of music.

Music is used to regulate mood and arousal in everyday life and to promote physical and psychological health and well-being in clinical settings. However, scientific inquiry into the neurochemical effects of music is still in its infancy. In this review, we evaluate the evidence that music improves health and well-being through the engagement of neurochemical systems for (i) reward, motivation, and pleasure; (ii) stress and arousal; (iii) immunity; and (iv) social affiliation.

The Song Remains the Same: A Replication and Extension of the MUSIC Model.

There is overwhelming anecdotal and empirical evidence for individual differences in musical preferences. However, little is known about what drives those preferences. Are people drawn to particular musical genres (e.

Multivariate activation and connectivity patterns discriminate speech intelligibility in Wernicke's, Broca's, and Geschwind's areas.

The brain network underlying speech comprehension is usually described as encompassing fronto-temporal-parietal regions while neuroimaging studies of speech intelligibility have focused on a more spatially restricted network dominated by the superior temporal cortex. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging with a novel whole-brain multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to more fully characterize neural responses and connectivity to intelligible speech. Consistent with previous univariate findings, intelligible speech elicited greater activity in bilateral superior temporal cortex relative to unintelligible speech.

Processing of musical structure by high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

Enhanced pitch perception and memory have been cited as evidence of a local processing bias in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This bias is argued to account for enhanced perceptual functioning ( Mottron & Burack, 2001 ; Mottron, Dawson, Soulières, Hubert, & Burack, 2006 ) and central coherence theories of ASD ( Frith, 1989 ; Happé & Frith, 2006 ). A local processing bias confers a different cognitive style to individuals with ASD ( Happé, 1999 ), which accounts in part for their good visuospatial and visuoconstructive skills.

What does it mean to be musical?

Music can be seen as a model system for understanding gene × environment interactions and how these can influence neurocognitive development. The concept of musicality, however, is underspecified and not well understood. Here, I propose a framework for defining musicality to provide a foundation for studying the contributions of biological and environmental factors.

Musical rhythm spectra from Bach to Joplin obey a 1/f power law.

Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm's contribution to our enjoyment of music.