MUSIC may be more like language than we realised, evoking memories of meaningful concepts, and not just emotional responses.
Stefan Koelsch鈥檚 team at the Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, showed that excerpts of classical music can activate or 鈥減rime鈥� memories of related words or concepts in just the same way that sentences or word lists do. Brain responses to the music were indistinguishable from the responses to sentences, the team reports in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn1197).
It is clear that music can encode some meaning by tapping into our emotions. We also learn some linguistic associations, to do with lyrics, titles or brands. But most linguists believe music itself has no semantic content. While Koelsch agrees that music cannot be used to organise a meeting, or explain a problem, he is convinced it has more meaning that we realise. 鈥淲hen we listen to music we don鈥檛 really know how rich is the semantic information that music carries,鈥� says Koelsch. 鈥淭he brain computations are just the same for musical and for linguistic information.鈥�
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