Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine (USA) have shown thatthe brain of all human beings is activated in exactly the same way when we listen to a piece of classical musicregardless of previous experiences and individual musical preferences. Specifically, the experiments reveal that hearing a melody for the first time puts into action structures involved in the planning of movement, memory and attention.
To make sure that the effects were due to the music and not the language, the researchers, coordinated by psychiatrist Vinod Menon, chose music without lyrics and excluded all those melodies that some participant had previously heard, to eliminate the effects of the ” familiarity “of a song. Finally, in their experiments they worked with pieces by the 18th century English composer William Boyce, nicknamed the “English Bach.” Observing the brains of the volunteers for more than nine minutes, and comparing the effect of listening to music with the effect of “pseudo-musical” stimuli (for example, sounds without rhythm or without harmony), they founda vast network of brain structures whose activity levels rose and fell in a strikingly similar pattern among study participantswhile listening to the music.
Both the midbrain and the thalamus and the frontoparietal cortex, which deals with higher functions such as attention and working memory, synchronized their activity with enough precision between some subjects and others, although the response was only observed in the right hemisphere, in areas that process non-linguistic stimuli. In other words, the study confirms thatmusic could be considered a universal language.
On the other hand, the intense activation of movement planning centers during the experiment indicates thatthe brain responds naturally to musical stimuli with claps, dance steps, or head movements. Even adapting our steps to the rhythm of the music.
