Your brain + tunes = I can’t get that song oughta my head!

UPDATE: Came across some fabulous stuff here, here and here.

Yet another “brain wiring” development…

In a study titled “Sound of silence activates auditory cortex” published in the March 10 issue of Nature, a Dartmouth team found that if people are listening to music that is familiar, they mentally call upon auditory imagery, or memories, to fill in the gaps if the music cuts out. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity, the researchers found that study participants could mentally fill in the blanks if a  familiar song was missing short snippets. Dartmouth release here and a good BBC News article here.

Reminds me of the big craze about the Mozart Effect that purported to change the wiring of a baby’s brain and a child’s spatial cognitive abilities. After learning of this in the late Eighties, I remember putting headphones on my wife’s stomach in 1988 when my daughter was in the womb — in the hope that classical music would somehow stimulate her cognitive function.

Maybe it worked! Our daughter is a talented musician that absolutely loves music.