The Beatles' Surprising Contribution To Brain Science

Wordmark of The Beatles, originally painted directly on drum by Erwin Ross, Hamburg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Jon Hamilton, NPR.org: http://www.npr.org

The same brain system that controls our muscles also helps us remember music, scientists say.

When we listen to a new musical phrase, it is the brain's motor system - not areas involved in hearing - that helps us remember what we've heard, researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans last month.

The finding suggests that the brain has a highly specialized system for storing sequences of information, whether those sequences contain musical notes, words or even events.

But the discovery might never have happened without The Beatles, says Josef Rauschecker of Georgetown University. As a teenager in Europe, Rauschecker says, he was obsessed with the group.
"They were kind of the hot band at the time and I would listen to music while I was studying," he says. "My mother would say, 'Don't do that, you can't concentrate.' "

But Rauschecker ignored her. He says The White Album, Revolver and Rubber Soul seemed to become a part of his teenage brain, and the memory of which songs came in which order never faded. "Years later I would put on one of these old LPs and then you know at the end of one track you immediately start singing the next one," he says, "as if it was all stored in your brain as a continuous sort of story."

That intrigued Rauschecker, who by this time was a brain scientist at Georgetown. He kept wondering which part of his brain knew the order of all those sequences of Beatles songs. "The funny thing is that if you ask me now what comes after 'Michelle' or whatever I wouldn't know," he says. "It's not explicit knowledge. But if you hear it, then you can immediately continue singing it."

So a couple of years ago Rauschecker's lab did an experiment. It had volunteers bring in a favorite CD and lie in a brain scanner. Then the scientists watched what happened as the volunteers listened. Sure enough, there was distinctive brain activity after each track ended. But Rauschecker says the brain activity wasn't where he thought it would be.

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