A Little Thinking Music :: Biology Essays Research Papers

A Little Thinking Music quarrel are the pen of the picturet, but music is the pen of the soul give tongue to Shneur Zalman. Aint it funny how a melody brings back memories/takes you to another place and time/completely changes your state of mind croons the rare country ballad. Give me the set boys and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and flip and drift away says the classic blues var.. We are a species preoccupy with these compositions of sound and rhythm. We call it the universal language and provide it the role of imparting our emotions with pop push through the restrictions of a linguistic system, we say that it has the ability to trigger memories and change moods. wherefore do our brains react so powerfully to music? How do we carry through it and what purpose does it serve? These are some of the questions I set out to answer in my little musical odyssey.When you hear a arrange of music, the ear converts the sound waves into vibrations in specific move of the inner and center ear. These vibrations are then translated into action potentials that travel through the eighth cranial nerve to the brain stem, the thalamus, and the auditory cortex (1). It seems that the brain takes a song and translates it into its own neurosymphony-sending electrical impulses to various parts of your brain. These varying patterns of impulses generate thoughts, feelings, and emotions (3) . It sounds closely as though we store various different patterns of these impulses in our brains and when the homogeneous pattern of sounds matches a pattern of impulses, it triggers a set of images. The interesting matter is that the equal set of frequencies or pattern of impulses generates different images for different people. For instance, when I hear the Beatles Yellow Submarine, I think of Mr. C, my fifth grade teacher, his old record player, and rock and roll Tuesdays. When my roommates brain registers the same pattern of impulses, it brings up the memory of he r familys tan colored Volkswagen Rabbit. When I hear Beethovens Moonlight Sonata, I hear raindrops and soft footsteps, while another person might hear rays of light falling on water. We all have distinct visions of the same pattern of sounds. Neurobiologists, like Harvards Mark Tramo, have yet to figure out exactly how this comes about (3) .Music is one thing that stimulates and utilizes most parts of the brain (2).