Do the brains of different people listening to the same
piece of music actually respond in the same way? An imaging study by Stanford
University School of Medicine scientists says the answer is yes, which may in
part explain why music plays such a big role in our social existence.
The investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging
to identify a distributed network of several brain structures whose activity
levels waxed and waned in a strikingly similar pattern among study participants
as they listened to classical music they'd never heard before. The results was
published online April 11 in the European Journal of Neuroscience.