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Arts & culture

Music Research Talks 14/15: Fourth Annual BRAMS Distinguished Lecture Robert Zatorre


Date & time
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Cost

All talks are free of charge and open to the public.

Where


Room MB 8.265 (1450 Guy Street)

Fourth Annual BRAMS Distinguished Lecture

Robert Zatorre, McGill:  From Perception to pleasure:  Music and its neural substrates

Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps in part because it allows expression and regulation of emotion, and evokes pleasure.  In this lecture I present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses.  First we will indentify some of the cortical circuits that are responsible for encoding and storage of tonal patterns, and for the recognition of structural regularities which lead to expectancies.  We will then present recent evidence from our lab concerning the striatal dopamine system, and its involvement in musical reward. We propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable predictions and expectancies to emerge from sound patterns, and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation. This model integrates basic neuroscience of reward mechanisms with independently derived concepts, such as tension and anticipation, from music theory.

Dr. Robert J. Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, and founding co-director of BRAMS lab. His research explores the functional and structural organization of the human brain, with special emphasis on two complex and characteristically human abilities: speech and music.

 

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