Toward an epigenetic view of our musical mind.

We are transient beings, in a world of constantly changing culture. At home in the fields of Art and Science, seemingly capable of magnificent abstractions, humans have an intense need to externalize their insights. Music is an art and a highly transmissible cultural product, but we still have an incomplete understanding of how our musical experience shapes and is vividly retained within our brain, and how it affects our behavior.

Neural language networks at birth.

The ability to learn language is a human trait. In adults and children, brain imaging studies have shown that auditory language activates a bilateral frontotemporal network with a left hemispheric dominance. It is an open question whether these activations represent the complete neural basis for language present at birth.

Functional specializations for music processing in the human newborn brain.

In adults, specific neural systems with right-hemispheric weighting are necessary to process pitch, melody, and harmony as well as structure and meaning emerging from musical sequences. It is not known to what extent the specialization of these systems results from long-term exposure to music or from neurobiological constraints. One way to address this question is to examine how these systems function at birth, when auditory experience is minimal.

Using MRI to characterize the anatomy and function of the auditory cortex in infancy.

An extended body of behavioral work has described the auditory skills of infants, but the neural basis of these skills has remained largely unexplored. Recently, noninvasive brain imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have been successfully used from the first hours after birth, providing informative data on auditory processing and its anatomic underpinnings. The goal of this paper is to examine this increasing body of data, focusing on a basic aspect of auditory processing that has attracted considerable attention and is starting to be elucidated: the hemispheric specialization for the processing of complex auditory stimuli.

Listening to action-related sentences activates fronto-parietal motor circuits.

Observing actions made by others activates the cortical circuits responsible for the planning and execution of those same actions. This observation-execution matching system (mirror-neuron system) is thought to play an important role in the understanding of actions made by others. In an fMRI experiment, we tested whether this system also becomes active during the processing of action-related sentences.