Music and the Brain

Did you know that neurons in the brain produce a kind of music?  Neuroscientist Miguel Nikolelis, author of Beyond Boundaries, compares the electrical activity of brain cells to the music of a symphony.

As a young man he was told by the doctor who later became his mentor that one day we would be able to listen to the music of the neurons, and that is exactly what has happened.

Neuroscientists have increasingly turned their attention away from the study of single cells and toward the ways in which neurons work together in the brain to produce behaviors.  Although there is specialization within areas of the brain, the brain as a whole actually works as a kind of democracy, a “neurolodemocracy” as Nikolelis calls it.  Cells across many brain areas work together at the same time to “define a particular behavior.”  There is a continuous communication, a constant flow of information among neurons that allows our brains to participate in many different functions, even to specialize.

Nikolelis compares this to the coded language of music.  He says that a single note of music, taken out of context, doesn't carry much meaning.  But when all the notes appear together within context, as part of a flow, produced by different instruments or voices playing or singing together, there is meaning.  It’s the same for the brain.  The firing of one brain cell alone communicates very little, but place it in context with hundreds or thousands of cells firing together, and suddenly you have, quite literally, a symphony that carries all sorts of meaning, and one that determines our behavior.

Apparently these multitudinous firings can be recorded and listened to.  And as Nikolelis says, “You have to be really obsessed and impassioned with the brain to appreciate that music, because it's like making popcorn under a bad AM signal.”  But he also says it sounds better than a Verdi opera.  And when he listens to a patient’s brain, it gives him goose bumps.

This is rather like the way a choir functions; many individual voices, each with their own timbre, communicating with one another via the conductor, their own ears and eyes, and through the myriad unseen ways in which human beings communicate; interacting with the music on the page, making instantaneous decisions regarding rhythm, pitch, vocal production, pronunciation, how loudly or softly to sing, and suddenly they coalesce and you have meaning, powerful meaning.

And to be a part of that is indeed better than just about anything you can imagine!

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic director and conductor

Master Chorus Eastside