Music has the best chance of providing pain relief when it is played at our natural rhythm, a McGill University research team has discovered.
This suggests it may be possible to reduce a patient’s level of pain by using technology to take a piece of music someone likes and adjust the tempo to match their internal rhythm, the researchers said.
The discovery was the subject of a paper published this week in Pain, the top journal in the field of pain medicine and research.
Music is a collective experience that binds people together. From orchestral play to audiences handclapping, synchronization lays the foundation for all musical interactions. But what explains our ability to get in sync with someone or act in lock step with a group?
C. L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize recognizes his seminal work in the cognition of music
Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Zatorre has been awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize in Cognitive Sciences.
The Heineken Prize–given every two years to five different researchers–is considered the most prestigious international science prize in The Netherlands and includes a monetary reward of US$200,000. Previous winners include Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, and Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France.
Study suggests humans have developed complementary neural systems in each hemisphere for auditory stimuli
Speech and music are two fundamentally human activities that are decoded in different brain hemispheres. A new study used a unique approach to reveal why this specialization exists.
Music, including songs with words, appears to be a universal phenomenon according to a paper published this week in Science. An international team of researchers involving musicians, data scientists, psychologists, political scientists and linguists, including one from McGill University, reached this conclusion after five years of collaboration, bringing together a broad range of skills and tools to the question of whether music is universal.
Using broad datasets to arrive at deep conclusions about music
Scientists prove difference between expected/actual outcomes cause reward response
If you love it when a musician strikes that unexpected but perfect chord, you are not alone. New research shows the musically unexpected activates the reward centre of our brains, and makes us learn about the music as we listen.
A new study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reveals a causal link between the neurotransmitter dopamine and the reward responses to music. The study was conducted by an international team including researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University, the University of Barcelona, and the Hospital de Sant Pau of Barcelona.
Engaging in musical activities such as singing and playing instruments in one-on-one therapy can improve autistic children’s social communication skills, improve their family’s quality of life, as well as increased brain connectivity in key networks, according to researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University.
Scientific research supports theories that music is healing. "The studies show that music can create profound neurochemical and biological changes, tangible, demonstrable ones," said psychologist Daniel Levitin, a professor emeritus at McGill University in Montreal, who specializes in neuroscience and music.
CNN
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that musical training helps people hear speech syllables in loud environments, and has shown how this happens. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers Yi Du and Robert Zatorre monitored brain function as musicians and non-musicians listened to speech fragments and varying background noise levels.
Enjoyment of music is considered a subjective experience; what one person finds gratifying, another may find irritating. Music theorists have long emphasized that although musical taste is relative, our enjoyment of music, be it classical or heavy metal, arises, among other aspects, from structural features of music, such as chord or rhythm patterns that generate anticipation and expectancy.
The Montreal Chamber Music Festival and PRIZMA, a program of McGill’s School of Continuing Studies, are proud to collaborate for the first time on a special series of lectures and concerts devoted to Beethoven’s string quartets.
The same brain-chemical system that mediates feelings of pleasure from sex, recreational drugs, and food is also critical to experiencing musical pleasure, according to a study by McGill University researchers published today in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
What does the 1960s Beatles hit “Girl” have in common with Astor Piazzolla’s evocative tango composition “Libertango”?
Probably not much, to the casual listener. But in the mind of one famously eclectic singer-songwriter, the two songs are highly similar. That’s one of the surprising findings of an unusual neuroscience study based on brain scans of the musician Sting.
