It is essential, to all learning, that one acquire the necessary vocabulary to thoroughly understand the concepts being taught. Altenmuller and Gruhn provide exactly that in their definitions of various brain mechanisms. A brief summary includes:
1) Brain imaging methods – the monitoring and documenting of neuronal activity during music perception, reasoning, and production. EEG (eletronencephalography) measures electrical activity of the neurons in the cerebral cortex and MEG (magnetoencephalography) assesses brain metabolism, cerebral flow, and O2 consumption of nerve cells.
2) Structure of the brain – hindbrain (medulla, pons, cerebellum) together with the midbrain constitute the brainstem, which regulates all vital and many sensory and motor functions. The midbrain (thalamus, hypothalamus). The forebrain (basal ganglia, hippocampus, amygdaloid nucleaus). The cerebral cortex (outer part of brain) constitutes both hemispheres of the brain each consisting of frontal (movement and future planning), temporal, parietal (somatic sensation, body imaging), and occipital lobes (vision processing).
The perception of music through the complex workings of the above terms begins with pitch and dynamic recognition, extends to timbre, and then auditory gestalt (form). These acoustic, patterns, associations, emotions, and expectations distinctions are based on new learning patterns as well as previously experienced patterns.
Claims that music is essential in the brain development of young children are confirmed when comparing the motor cortex and corpus callosum of musicians and nonmusicians. Several studies have confirmed these findings along with musician’s ability to learn specific tasks through neural, auditory, and sensory-motor plasticity.
Learning in young children constitutes anatomical adaptations whereas older people require modification of brain organization (plasticity/flexibility). It is important however to mention that various approaches to teaching can greatly affect both areas of learning. Science is steadily working on creating models to better define required teaching approaches.
I thought the review of brain imaging was helpful for letting me know how data can be collected. Understanding the structure of the brain is important, though I must admit that it feels a bit abstract from the reading in this article. It would be interesting to see a 3D model to manipulate to aid in learning these various parts of the brain. The discussion of the parts of the brain used in music perception was dense, but gave a good overview of the complexity of musical perception. Differences in the brains of musicians seem to indicate that we can alter our brain structure by being musical, which seems to have a lot of potential for additional research and also possibilities for research in music teaching and learning practices. The discussion of loss of control in musicians who are highly trained (focal dystonia) provides an additional tool for studying the effect of music on the brain. This is a dense but informative article.
ReplyDelete