How Does Our Brain Know What We Are Listening To Is ‘Music’?

There are many different features that distinguish humans from other living things. Some of these features are quite obvious: we all know about features such as the ability to use the thumb, the perception of time, and walking upright. Listen to music It’s actually a human skill.

Being able to listen to music is a human trait, but how exactly can we understand music? What is the difference between us and other living things?

Understanding our brain

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand it, we would still be too simple to understand it.” – Jostein Gaarder

“Music is the expression of eternity.” -Schelling

“I can’t hear bro bass or anything.” -I

Listening to music is our brain. almost every part of it provides. Neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya, who has taught a course called “Music and the Brain” at the University of California for 15 years, also explains the impact of listening to music on the human mind.

Neurologically speaking, different parts of our brain affected differently we can see. Explaining these effects step by step will perhaps enable us to see the effect of music on the brain.

What happens in different parts of our brain when listening to music:

• Frontal Lobe: This region, which is normally used for thinking, making decisions and making plans, is more developed in humans than other living things. Listening to music also strengthens the Frontal Lobe.
• temporal lobe: Thanks to the temporal lobe, which is located in both the right and left hemispheres of our brain, we can understand what we hear. While listening to music, some of this area allows to understand sounds and music, and some provide understanding of words.
• Broca’s Area: This area, which allows us to speak, is also effective on how we communicate and has an important role in producing music. According to experts, this is the reason why making music improves communication skills.
• Wernicke Field: We can understand written and spoken language thanks to this region. We owe our analysis and enjoyment of music to this field.
• Occipital Lobe: This part actually helps us understand what we see. Musicians use this part when listening to a piece, while ordinary citizens like me use the temporal lobe.
• Cerebellum: It is the part that handles movements and physical memory. Musical abilities acquired through muscle memory are stored here. The importance of practicing comes from running this part.
• Nucleus Accumbens: This section helps us to understand the concepts of pleasure and reward. Dopamine secretion takes place here. It is thanks to the same region that we enjoy music.
• amygdala: It is our prominent brain region that processes and triggers our emotions. He is the reason why we feel, laugh and cry while listening to the songs.
• hippocampus: The hippocampus region, where our memories are formed and stored, our emotional reactions are organized and we use to find direction, is exactly “Don’t play that song, it has a memory!” That’s the part we use.
• hypothalamus: Thanks to this part, which connects the endocrine system with the nervous system, we can control the secretion of hormones and chemicals. Sleep, food, metabolism, growth, sexuality etc. The Hypothalamus, which manages functions, allows us to physically react to that music while listening to music. Do you relax while listening to classical music? hypothalamus.
• Corpus Callosum: The task of enabling the right and left parts of our brain to communicate belongs to this part. Thus, we can make coordinated movements and use our logic and intuition.
• putamen: It is the part that processes the sense of rhythm and ensures the coordination of our body movements. When music is played, the amount of dopamine in this part increases. As a result, we respond more to the rhythm.

How do we understand music?

“Those who don’t hear the music think the dancers are crazy.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

We understood how different parts of the human brain are affected by music. So how does our brain react when we hear music? Bringing together independent voices to call it music what is causing it?

music first with voice starting. As the sounds repeat, we begin to understand it with a loop. Moreover, this situation is the same all over the world, and every culture has some kind of musical understanding.

Other living things have different developmental processes in their brain development. For example, people say beats per minute, so rhythms can follow. While there are other animals that can do this, not all of them can. Not all skills can keep up with the pace.

Curtains and melodies

As the rhythms repeat curtain creates. Being able to get a melody or see the melody by putting these curtains together is an even rarer feature. For example, to an animal you teach a melody, at higher pitches If you play a sound, it will try to learn the timbre from scratch.

These curtains ways of perception may differ from culture to culture. For example, the maqams of Turkish Art Music and the notes of Western music basically mean the same thing, but both the way the octaves are separated and their naming are different.

Our language and communication skills are another important part. to understand the words adds to the equation. Bringing all the pieces together and understanding music and giving meaning to songs is known as something only humans can do.

Is music for humans?

Generally speaking, the human brain Thanks to its advanced structure it can make sense of what we perceive as music. It is possible thanks to the skills of people to bring together different facts one by one, to collect the missing pieces, and even to add words to it.

Music is such a part of human life that it is simply very small minorities cannot perceive the factors that make up the music. They also only have one problem in one spot. Someone who has completely lost the capacity to perceive music is not yet included in the recordings.