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Moving music
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Why is it that when we listen to particularly beautiful or moving music, we get goosebumps and even cry? It is well known that areas of the brain that recognise and process music are linked with areas that handle emotions, and scientists are gradually mapping these areas in greater detail with brain-imaging technology.
Last year, a study by English researchers at the University of Newcastle drew important insights from a single case, a 52-year-old radio announcer who lost his emotional response to music after a stroke. He was still able to recognise music that had given him particular pleasure, by Rachmaninoff, but he no longer experienced the intense emotional states that used to come from listening to it. Ordinarily a stroke that causes loss of emotional response is accompanied by a loss of musical perception, called amusia. In this patient's case, however, they were able to separate musical perception from the emotional response and thus to identify a particular area of damage, called the left insula, as being involved in the emotional processing of music.
It is part of a widely distributed brain network recruited by other powerful emotional stimuli, producing arousal of the autonomic nervous system and leading to various physiological reactions.
The New York Times
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