[Paleopsych] NYT: Music and Emotion
Premise Checker
checker at panix.com
Sat Aug 20 20:22:06 UTC 2005
Music and Emotion
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/science/16qna.html
By [3]C. CLAIBORNE RAY
Music and Emotion
Q. Why is it that when I listen to particularly beautiful or moving
music I get goose bumps and even cry?
A. It is well known that areas of the brain that recognize and process
music are linked with areas that handle emotions, and scientists are
gradually mapping these areas in greater detail with brain-imaging
technology.
Last year, a study by English researchers at the University of
Newcastle, published in The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and
Psychiatry, drew important insights from a single case, a 52-year-old
radio announcer who lost his emotional response to music after a
stroke.
He was still able to recognize music that had given him particular
pleasure, by Rachmaninoff, but he no longer experienced the intense
emotional states that used to come from listening to it.
Ordinarily, the researchers said, a stroke that causes loss of
emotional response is accompanied by a loss of musical perception,
called amusia.
In this patient's case, however, they were able to separate musical
perception from the emotional response and thus to identify a
particular area of damage, called the left insula, as being involved
in the emotional processing of music.
It is part of a widely distributed brain network recruited by other
powerful emotional stimuli, producing arousal of the autonomic nervous
system and leading to various physiological reactions.
C. CLAIBORNE RAY
Readers are invited to submit questions by mail to Question, Science
Times, The New York Times, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y.
10036-3959, or by e-mail to question at nytimes.com.
More information about the paleopsych
mailing list