Research Hit: Human Brains Naturally Build "Music Neurons"

Music seems to be an inbuilt instinct with brain cells being assigned to music - and this improves auditory ability

Andy, I hear you have become a bit of an audiophile - interested in high-quality music production?

Indeed, and you didn’t mention spending vast amount of money to gain aural bliss!

Audiophiles tend to be a bit technical but primarily music lovers - loving the sounds and emotions that music in all its forms generate.

And this music instinct seems to be natural, right?

Right. Obviously as all cultures have music, and just about everybody likes some form of music, it seems obvious that this is instinctive.

But the ins and outs of this are not clear, and how the brain builds this instinct also, and this is why this recent piece of research by Gwangsu Kim and colleagues of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is insightful.

So what did they do?

First off, this is research using artificial neural networks - basically a simulation of the brain.

Can this be transferred to the real brain?

Probably - what these artificial networks do is enable simulations which are based on data gleaned from how real brains operate. This enables running different simulations which would be impossible to do in real brains. So the results are certainly very useful and instructive if not based on real live brains.

Ok, got it, and so what did they show?