Stories of Scientists

 Music never failed to amuse

This curious someone from Argentina

He trained as an organist

While also doing psychology!!!

Often he would wonder,

Is the brain hard wired for music?

Why does this music give me chills?

Was something he always pondered.

Let's start by messing with the pitch,

And where all the brain fires

Use the missing fundamental phenomenon

And see the right auditory cortex fire!

Oh, unless it is injured or you have a lesion in there,

Then even with two separate pitches, the differences will be rare!

And when you imagine music it still is active,

Your inner voice is never unheard, 'cause the auditory cortex is proactive!

And come what may, always remember,

A musician's auditory cortex has more gray matter.

Then he asked what happens when musicians get creative?

Found parieto frontal cortex and auditory cortex being extremely interactive!

But why does music feel so good, why does one get chills?

Musician or not a musician, why is it that it instills?

Skin conductance, temperature, heart rate and respiration were checked

To capture that state of chill, data was decked!

As usual, when there's anything pleasurable,

Mesolimbic dopamine release is the why that is capable

Also there's high blood flow in the striatum,

But that's not the only thing in our system!

Pre chills there's activity in the right caudate,

Which see a sharp decline when there's the chills moment;

Then you see, NAc activity spikes!

That's exactly the chills, the moment you like!

So probably your brain is hard wired for music,

And there are areas specialised for pitch recognition,

The earlier you begin to learn music, more trained you become,

There goes human cognition!

And if you're wondering who the person is,

Who researched this weirdly interesting stuff,

The name's Robert Zartorre, is that not enough?

#BRAINSCI