Around The Globe

Music and the Brain

Our brains have only so much room. We do not have the space for separate "processors" for each topic we think about. As the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) discovered, music and language seem to be next-door neighbors in Wernicke's area, which lies behind the auditory area in the left hemisphere (Sergent, J., 1993).

In 1933, Ravel started making spelling errors on manuscripts. By the end of the year he could not read, and could not write his name, thus showing signs of Wernicke's aphasia. At the same time, he lost his ability to write down his music. One of his friends heard him say, "... this opera is here, in my head. I hear it, but I will never write it... I can no longer write my music." He also could not sight-read music. Yet Ravel still could play scales, and a few pieces from memory, and he could tell when a performer missed a note when playing his pieces. He still knew music, but he could not translate music into written form. Even though Ravel learned music and language at different times, the processes he used to translate both words and sounds into writing seem to have taken place in the same part of the brain.

Motion Perception in Space

It's hard to keep a sense of balance in space. Astronauts in low gravity often feel themselves moving and tumbling when they are sitting still. Worse yet, half of them suffer motion sickness for two to four days at the start of their flights (Newberg, 1994). Researchers have guessed that the astronauts get sick because the information coming from their vestibular systems and their visual systems does not agree; astronauts often see themselves moving without "feeling" the motion.

French scientists Cauquil et al. (1997) tested people on earth with astronaut-style sensory conflicts. The researchers asked subjects to stand and try to balance on a pivoting board. One group put on a pair of glasses that rotated images by moving prisms in the lenses. Another group wore electrodes that stimulated their vestibular systems with very weak pulses of electricity (the subjects could not feel the shock). All of the subjects were worse at balancing when they were being stimulated. The pulses made 57% of the subjects sick, while the prism glasses gave 73% of subjects symptoms. When the vestibular-pulse subjects closed their eyes during the stimulation, though, their symptoms became much less severe, showing that it really was visual-vestibular conflict that made them feel sick, and not some other disturbance.