Research
April 26, 2010
Notes on the musical brain
Students react to a performance in the musical brain class.
Symphony conductor Yoel Levi has memorized more than 2,500 musical scores. “It’s an astonishing skill,” says Paul Lennard, director of Emory’s neuroscience and behavioral biology (NBB) program. “A score can be the size of a small telephone book.”
Levi, principal conductor of the Orchestre National d’Ile de France, was among the guest lecturers in a seminar Lennard taught this spring, “The Musical Brain.” Levi told the students about his memorization techniques. When he conducts, Levi said, his mind projects semi-transparent notes of the score over the members of the orchestra.
“He described it like the heads-up display that pilots use,” Lennard says.
The course featured more than a dozen such distinguished guests from the world of music. Director of Jazz Studies Gary Motley described the mental process of letting himself go during musical improvisation. Richard Kogan, a concert pianist and psychiatrist, discussed correlations between mental illness and creative genius. Motley and Kogan were among the many guests who also performed for the students.
“Music provides a window into cognition and the human condition,” says Lennard, who tied the personal stories of the guests to his own lectures on the neural basis of musical perception and performance. Among the topics covered were the relationships of music to language, emotions and memory, and whether music is unique to humans.
“It was cool to interact with so many renowned musicians, and to learn about the union between music and science,” says sophomore Jonathan Lin, a double major in NBB and music, who has played the violin for 10 years. “I want to be a scientist and a musician, which is one of the reasons I came to Emory.”
More than 100 students took the class this semester, which was cross-listed by NBB and music and funded by a grant from Emory’s Center for Mind, Brain and Culture.
Darwin theorized that music may have preceded language in human evolution, an idea that remains under debate today. “It’s remarkable how music is involved in so many parts of the brain, and that there seems to be an almost underlying neural basis for why it’s important to human culture,” Lin says.
Wenxia Zhao, a senior chemistry major and music minor, began playing the violin when she was 6 years old. “We learned that the brains of musicians are different from those of non-musicians, if they start playing before the age of 7,” she says.
Zhao, who is headed for medical school in the fall, especially enjoyed the guest lectures by Kogan and music therapist Cori Snyder. “She explained how some patients who can’t speak after a traumatic brain injury are able to sing words,” Zhao recalls. “I think that’s amazing.”
This is the second semester that Lennard has offered “The Musical Brain,” which combines his own professional and personal interests. His wife, Cecilia Arzewski, is a former concert master for the Atlanta Symphony and spoke to the class about motor memory and performance.
“I’m immersed in the world of musicians,” Lennard says. “I love music and I believe it is an important route into understanding the brain.”
