Mirror Neurons

Recently when talking about things I'd been blogging about with a friend who is very knowledgeable about current brain research, she told me about mirror neurons, which set off a cascade of things falling into place for me. Here are some snips from Wikipedia on the subject:

>>  A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. . .

A large number of experiments . . .  have shown that certain brain regions . . .  are active when a person experiences an emotion (disgust, happiness, pain, etc.) and when he or she sees another person experiencing an emotion. . . 

More recently, Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab and colleagues have shown that people that are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activations both in the mirror system for hand actions and the mirror system for emotions, providing more direct support to the idea that the mirror system is linked to empathy. . . 

This has led to suggestions that human language evolved from a gesture performance/understanding system implemented in mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been said to have the potential to provide a mechanism for action understanding, imitation learning, and the simulation of other people's behaviour. . . 

In Philosophy of mind, mirror neurons have become the primary rallying call of simulation theorists concerning our 'theory of mind.' 'Theory of mind' refers to our ability to infer another person's mental state (i.e., beliefs and desires) from their experiences or their behavior. . . <<

Research on all of this is in the earliest of stages, so it may not pan out, but if it does, here are some of the things it would illuminate.

* My notion of getting "traction" with a client or audience.

* Jonathan West's point about mimicry being so important to musicality

* My long held intuition that gesture is a substrate of music making.

* How "flow" can be shared by music makers and their audience.

* Why simply demonstrating a point about music making can be so effective.

* A John Ericson post months ago about how imagining shooting free throws was as helpful as actually doing so.

* How music can communicate emotions.

More On Mirror Neurons

I'm betting that of all the new information we're getting about how our brains respond to music, what we find out about mirror neurons will be the most helpful in explaining how music can affect us so deeply. It's beginning to look like the ability of music to trigger mirror neurons will be the key to understanding how it can encode emotional content. 

Music is a language, but it's much more non-verbal than verbal. For me, when we talk about musicality, we're talking about how music and music makers can suggest to us everything from a marching army to a flirtatious wink, from the movements and gestures of someone deeply sad to the movements and gestures of someone exuberantly joyous. Sometimes emotionally evocative gestures are partly embedded in the physical playing of an instrument, like the harp. More often the gestural communication is in the music itself and is brought out by how it's played. Years ago I came up with the notion that, at least in part, music is gesture made audible, and the neuroscience seems to be suggesting that's the case.

Here are two excerpts from the article mentioned in a previous post. The first talks about mirror neurons and the second alludes to what I've mentioned before, how in the brain it seems almost every function is mediated by others, and nothing is particularly straight forward.

As they expected, the areas of the brain that manage emotions, like the amygdala, lit up for all subjects when the researchers played the expressive version. But, contrary to their expectations, those areas, instead of continuously fluctuating in response to changes in the music, remained relatively constant.

What surprised the scientists was the part of the brain that actually did vary: the mirror neuron system.

Large explained that when we see someone doing something, our mirror neuron system attempts to replicate the same condition in our own mind. This enables us to empathize with someone else on a very fundamental level.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . . 

. . . Heather Chapin, a doctoral student at the time the study was done who ran the experiments, commented on the difficulty of trying to understand the workings of the brain from the outside: "I'm a black and white kind of girl, and human neuroimaging was much more gray than I was prepared to handle.". . .

Great Neuroscience Article

This article in Nautilus pulls together things in the neuroscience of music and takes us another conceptual step toward more fully understanding the ways music affects us. 

The main idea is that music can be, and usually is, a social activity, even when you're listening alone - which is a great way to think about mirror neurons and how important they are. This is the first time I've seen someone say just listening to music, without seeing it performed, can trigger mirror neurons. Given my idea that music is in part physical gesture made audible, it's great validation.

Something else that I think is helpful is the use of "pre-cognitive" in the explanation, which may be a better term than "non-conscious", a term I've used to say the same thing.

There's also a wonderful working definition of what music is. 

Here is a long snip from the article:

Music is as much a part of human evolution as language, tool-making, and cognitive development, Schulkin and Raglan tell us. It’s a bridge. “Music is typically something shared, something social; we may sing in the shower or on a solitary walk, but music is most of the time social, communicative, expressive, and oriented toward others,” Schulkin and Raglan write.

Molnar-Szakacs explains the brain’s mirror-neuron system provides the neural basis of music’s social powers. The properties of the human mirror-neuron system are based on research showing that the same regions in our brain are active when we perform, see, or hear an action. The “mirror” regions of our brains fire whether we’re playing the guitar or listening to Pete Townshend play it.

The mirror-neuron system, Molnar-Szakacs says, “allows someone to identify with another by providing an automatic, pre-cognitive mechanism by which to understand their actions by mapping them onto our own neural representations of those actions. In addition, it represents the intention behind those actions.”

The moment you hear a sequence of hierarchically organized abstract sounds we call music, a multitude of associations are activated in your brain. These can include memories, emotions, and even motor programs for playing music. Together they can imply a sense of human agency. That sensation is what sets music apart from other types of sounds. “The brain interprets the structure of the music as intentionality that is coming from a human agent,” Molnar-Szakacs says. “This, combined with all the associations evoked by the music, is what makes the experience social.”

There's more to the article, it's all interesting, and it's all worth reading. 

How We Receive Music

     As we’ve gotten the Music Room up and running this year, what has struck me most has been the audience reactions. Because it’s a very comfortable space with sparkling acoustics, the audience experience is about as good as it gets aurally and socially. At intermission and after the music, people are physically and verbally animated; there are lots of wide eyes, hand gesturings and animated conversations. I always ask as many people as I can what it is they like, and the answers are all over the board. 

     Back in the 60’s I came across Karl Jung’s idea that there are four ways of experiencing the world around us - via thinking, via sensation, via feeling, and via intuition. A recent FaceBook conversation with Kyle Gann catalyzed my realizing those four modes are a great way to talk about how different people receive music, and that since we all have different combinations of these four modes of experiencing music, it goes a long way towards explaining why so may different kinds of music can have such ardent fans.

THINKING - “Theory mind” is the term I use for people who can distinguish instantly between major, minor, diminished and augmented chords and whether they have added pitches like 2nds, 4ths, 6ths, 9ths, 11ths and so on. Theory mind can also hear and name the chord functions in real time, such as the I chord leading to the IV chord, to the vi chord. When modulations occur, they can say what the new key is and how the chords in the previous key were manipulated to prepare the ear for that modulation. 

On many occasions I’ve had band directors and fellow brass players tell me that when you have the third of the chord it should be played slightly flatter than it would be in equal temperament, and I marvel that they can automatically know where in the chord the pitch they’re playing fits. 

Part of Kyle Gann’s FB comment that triggered this post illustrates theory mind:

The other day a cultured woman with a little musical knowledge asked me what I thought made Schumann's music so wonderful. I went into my spiel about his diagonal harmonies, how he'll hit a dissonant note and not resolve it until the chord meant to harmonize the resolution has already passed, and also about how unusual the spacings of his piano sonorities are.

SENSATION - I think one of the reasons the live performances at the Music Room so affect people is that they’re simply hearing the various timbres of the instruments much more fully than what recordings can ever capture, especially if those recordings are compressed down to mp3 levels. Even audience members sitting in the back are quite close to the performers, and the very good acoustics make the aural sensations immediate and fully textured. This means the fast/slow; high/low; and soft/loud parameters of the music are easily perceived. 

When playing the horn, I have to trust that my sensation is helping me play in tune, even though my weakness in “theory mind” means I don’t know where in the chord the pitch I’m playing fits.

FEELING - One way music “touches” us is that it often encodes physical gestures that trigger our emotions. Most straightforwardly, when we see a violinist caressing notes out of their instrument or a timpanist pounding out a martial rhythm, we feel the emotions we associate with those gestures. The neural pathway for this phenomenon employs mirror neurons. When we see someone making a physical gesture, our brain fires the neurons we’d use to make that same gesture (more here). I also think, with zero proof, that just hearing some gestures in music can trigger mirror neurons, even if we can't see the performer making the physical gesture. Less straightforwardly, while phrasings and articulations in music may not have direct physical cognates, they can evoke less specific feelings and moods.

Also, a piece of music can call up emotions we’ve come to associate with that particular piece because of when and where we’ve heard it before. 

INTUITION - Intuition is non-verbal and non-rational by nature, so it’s hard to talk about. I’ve been told professionally I’m more intuitive than most, and while it’s a great help to me as a group therapist, the problem is that I can’t know right away if my intuition about something is correct. With that caveat in mind, I’ll suggest that one way intuition may come into play is those of us without “theory mind” can still intuit the general structure of a piece. I think our intuitive side can also inform us as to how the performers are approaching the music and their connection to the audience.  

Our intuitive sides are probably also part of whatever it is that happens during “flow” experiences  when our normal ego fades, time flows differently, and we feel part of a larger whole (more here).

Empathy and Proprioception

This article in Forbes (there's an ad that you have to click through) is one of several in the past six months or so talking about research indicating the use of botox can weaken one's empathy for others. 

“When the facial muscles are dampened, you get worse in emotion perception, and when when facial muscles are amplified, you get better at emotion perception.” . . .

. . . Taken together, the two studies seem to indicate a direct relationship between ability to express emotion through facial expression, and the ability to experience emotion oneself, or identify it in others.

Seems to me there's probably a connection between this information and the new information on mirror neurons.

Large explained that when we see someone doing something, our mirror neuron system attempts to replicate the same condition in our own mind. This enables us to empathize with someone else on a very fundamental level.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . .

In making music, proprioception would seem to be involved as well, as that's the sense that besides telling us how physically accurate we are, it's part of how we can tell whether and how we are gesturally informing the music with emotion.

During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

Neuroscience Roundup

This long article in the NYT is a nice summary and discussion of things I've already posted on. They even use in the title the "tickle the brain" image I've talked about before. The added value is their having interviewed Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma and Rosanne Cash to get their responses to the data.

I really like this from Ms. Cash:

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

And here's a quote from Dr. Large at FAU on mirror neurons:

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

And here's something I hadn't come across, but surely reinforces my notion of the primal importance of physical gesture in musical communication.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”

Neuroscience Roundup

This article is the best introduction yet to the neuroscience of music. A few snips:

. . .“It’s like the brain is on fire when you’re listening to music,” says Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In terms of brain imaging, studies have shown listening to music lights up, or activates, more of the brain than any other stimulus we know.” 

. . . Using music to study and stimulate the brain’s emotional circuits may lead to new therapies for treating a wide range of emotional disorders, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, scientists say. By understanding how music activates and coordinates the various emotional mechanisms in the brain, scientists may find ways to rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for damaged or underperforming brain regions. . . 

. . . Despite the long list of potential benefits for health and happiness, Koelsch contends that the deep, complex experience that music delivers is primarily a social, rather than an individual, phenomenon. . .    

. . . Together, the findings suggest that music has the capacity to both turn on and tone down neural activity in the brain. . . .

. . . Recently, Koelsch’s team showed that making music boosts mood, even if you’re not musically inclined. . . .Koelsch credits the change, at least in part, to music’s ability to engage various social functions. He plans to test this idea by comparing people who make music in a group with those who play solo. . . .

. . . Studies show that listening to music stimulates brain areas specialized for imitation and empathy that contain what researchers call mirror neurons. These brain circuits, first described in monkeys, act like mirrors in the mind, reflecting others’ actions and intentions as if they were one’s own. The neurons allow you to feel loved ones’ pain or simulate their actions, even if only in your mind. . . . 

. . . Music “is particularly effective in establishing a sense of unity, belongingness and trust among individuals,” says Koelsch. “I don’t say that music always does this — apparently it doesn’t. But it can be very powerful in doing so.”

Music/Spiritual Practice

This post by Pliable gets at something I've tried to talk about here from time to time, i.e. the parallels between engagement in music and engagement in a spiritual path. He's talking about Zen Buddhism, but I think other paths would qualify for this discussion.

Accepting parallels between engaging new listeners and transmission as practiced in Zen Buddhism takes us down an interesting path. Transmission is totally dependant on physical interaction between teacher and student.

His use of the word "transmission" implies something of more value than mere entertainment to pass the time. "Physical interaction" allows for the deeper communication possible with embodied cognition and mirror neurons. It also allows for the connection between the performer and audience Hilary Hahn has spoken of.

All the dogmas that have developed around reaching new audiences involve adding insulating layers between performer and listener; these range from performance conventions to digital concert halls and virtual orchestras. Yet, if the analogy between classical music and transmission is valid, the process should be reversed. We do not need more intermediate layers. Instead we need high voltages to flow between superconductors (pun not intended) in close promiximity to one another. Which means more live music, physical interaction between audience and performers, music education, music therapy, amateur, youth and scratch orchestras and similar initiatives. And less of an awful lot of things we are getting more of.

It amazes me that more people don't see things this way. It delights me that one of the few happens to have one of the most widely read blogs on the planet. 

Another way of putting this is that there's a lot of attention paid to the very top of the music making pyramid, but not nearly so much to the rest of it down below. In schools, lots of money and time is expended upon the small minority of students in the band and chorus, while the majority are shut out, sometimes very rudely. Many people seem to view music making as something to be left to the elite, but the new research coming in is telling us it can benefit us all, not just the technically advanced. 

One of the main causes of this focus on the top of the pyramid is the ubiquity of recorded music with all its technical perfections. People tend to conflate the value of technical skill with the value of simply making music and listening to it. To my mind the main issue is that there be a match between the music being made and the audience's ability to appreciate it. It's that connection which is important, and technical wizardry can either be a help or a hinderance. A priest or lama helping someone along the path doesn't spout the arcane points of theology until the student is ready. Getting someone on a good path and helping them stay on it is more important than trying to impress them with your knowledge.

This all reminds me of why I write music. For me, the point is to create music the players will enjoy playing and the audience will enjoy listening to. If that happens, the connection is made and the benefits of music will flow from that connection to all concerned. The most heartening thing about the reception Timepiece is getting is the sense it's largely successful in those terms. (More on this compositional motivation here)

(Pliable continues down this path here and is kind enough to mention this post in the footnote)

Gesture and Learning

In this post over on the musician's brain Lois Svard talks about what I would call the gestural component to learning. Basically, if you get you whole body to feel the rhythms and gestures in the music you're making, more parts of the brain are involved and the learning goes deeper and lasts longer. 

Down in my comment I mentioned mirror neurons and she knows what they are and agrees they're important ("convinced that understanding them is key to learning and performance") - so she's got my full attention. 

Mirrored Feelings

Here's a quote from Roger Scruton's Understanding Music, which I found in this review of the book, which was linked by Arts and Letters Daily (a terrific website).

>>> Just as facial expressions do not communicate something that can be understood so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like when we ourselves make such an expression, so too, according to Scruton, does some elemental aspect of musical experience enjoin us to engage our imagining in similar fashion. In this way, and because the experience of music is not, at least not typically, heard as a single expression, the imagination is forced to grapple with the musical shapes and forms as they unfold over time, following its movement as it echoes in, or is anticipated by, the movements of our body and rational imagination. <<<

This seems a very good non-technical way of talking about mirror neurons and how they enable musical communication.

photo - animal tracks on the two feet of snow we had just over a week ago

Recorded Music

I keep coming back to the idea that the ability to listen to recorded music is the biggest change to the culture of music making, ever, with all sorts of recognized and unrecognized consequences. 

In this post, Kyle Gann talks about how much he likes recorded music, particularly his own. As usual over there, the comments are great.

In this post, Terry Teachout wonders whether second tier orchestras are needed in the age of the iPod.

In this post, ACD takes issue with Terry in his usual bracing style.

Mirror neurons, and the notion that live music is healthier than recorded, go unmentioned. Part of me thinks most music specialists, whatever the species, tend to go for the abstract elements of music and lose sense of the common touch elements of music making.

Why Live Music

In the previous post I talked about some advantages of acoustic music over amplified music, and in this one want to talk a little about live music versus recorded music.

One of the things the neuroscientists often say about what pulls the listener into the music is the unexpected. While we like some sense of structure to give us context, if there are no surprises along the way, we become bored. The thing about recorded music is that once you've heard it, it never changes. The first time or two I hear one of Glenn Gould's immaculately edited, so as to be error free, recordings of Bach, I'm amazed. On subsequent listenings, though, the some of the magic slips away. I often use the word "fresh" for music that I like, and recorded music can never sound fresh on repeated listenings.

Live performances usually mean finger slips along the way, but they also mean that you'll never hear that piece of music played that way ever again, and that in itself adds excitement. Over the years I've noticed some classical critics will point out errors in a performance, while going on to say that's what you get with live performance, and that even with an error here and there, live music is more moving to the listener than recordings.

Another thing about live performance is that the audience makes a difference. Years I ago came across this quote by Hilary Hahn:

The problem is that acoustic performers rely on the audience's attention and focus and can tell when the audience isn't mentally present. Your listening is part of our interpretive process. If you're not really listening, we're not getting the feedback of energy from the hall, and then we might as well be practicing for a bunch of people peering in the window. It's just not as interesting when the cycle of interpretation is broken.

Another aspect of watching live performance is the triggering of mirror neurons. When we see the physical gestures musicians make, we "feel" those motions in ourselves, and often associate emotions with those gestures. 

Persona

The word persona comes from the Greek for mask, specifically the ones actors wore in dramas. Somewhere along the line I remember seeing that besides hiding the face, they somehow altered the voice of the actor as well.

 ~~~ Update - Just checked Wikipedia and found:

 

This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for a kind of mask made to resonate with the voice of the actor (per sonare meaning "to sound through").

The latin word derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and its meaning in the latter Roman period changed to indicate a "character" of a theatrical performance.~~~

In psychology, and I think Jung in particular, persona is the term to describe the face we present to others and how they perceive us. It seems as well a handy term to describe how musicians present themselves to their audience.

Jeffrey Agrell has two great posts up talking about the non-musical aspects of performance here and here that I've read several times and been meaning to post links to. 

Then today came across another of those botox inhibiting emotional intelligence stories here.

"Our facial expressions reveal social context by mirroring expressions of those around us, giving us insight into their emotions, states of mind and future actions," he says. The Botox study, he says, suggests that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret language.

The new findings fit with the increasingly accepted theory that aspects of higher thought, such as language, judgment and memory, are shaped by our bodily sensations and movements, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and a leading scholar on the role of the body in emotion. According to this "embodied" view of cognition, which has gained popularity over the last decade or so, the brain makes sense of the world at least partly by simulating action.

Connecting with an audience while making music means a lot more than simply getting the notes right, and Jeffrey's posts are a great survey of what's involved, and your persona as perceived by the audience is as important as the music itself. Part of what's going on has to do with mirror neurons.

One thing I've noticed recently in working with these ideas and trying to keep a more relaxed and personable face while performing (and practicing) is that my facial expression affects the tone and emotional content of my singing voice way more than I'd realized. It's obvious, really, but a lot about music making is obvious only when you give it some attention.

Philip Ball Article

This article by Philip Ball hits on several topics:

. . . Focal dystonia is sometimes called 'musician's cramp', but it is not a primarily muscular problem: it begins in the brain. As neuroscientist Jessica Grahn of the University of Cambridge, UK, explains, it stems from the fact that intense musical practice can overinflate the mental representation of the relevant part of the body (usually the fingers, although it can affect lip control in brass players). Once the neural representations of the fingers overlap, they can no longer be controlled independently. . . . But it is precisely because the disorder is a neural rather than a muscular problem that dystonia is so hard to treat, and there is still no genuine cure. . . . 

. . . Although she acknowledges that musical expression is multi-faceted, she argues that current neurological studies suggest that the activation of mirror neurons — 'empathy circuits' that fire both when we watch another person perform an action and when we perform it ourselves — offer a clue about how music works. It may be, she says, that when we hear music, we can 'read' it as we would read indicators of emotional state in another person's vocal or physical gestures. . . . .

. . .  support may be emerging for the suggestion of philosopher Susanne Langer that music mimics the dynamics of emotion itself. Or, as psychologist Carroll Pratt put it in 1931, that 'music sounds the way emotions feel'.