Omphaloskepsis, of Music and Mind

The neuroscience of music is a fascinating subject for speculation - a result of music's general popular appeal, its emotional impact on a substantial subset of the population, and our relative ignorance of its evolutionary and physiologic underpinnings. Whether music is akin to 'auditory cheesecake' or the fundamental basis of and precursor to spoken language (see recent Economist article), it should be a topic of particular interest to any systems-oriented neuroscientist because of its dependence on coordinated communication and interplay among cortical, limbic, and basal neural centers. A composer, for example, might begin with emotional inspiration influenced by the limbic brain, translates it into an analytic form that can be recognized and interpreted by the neocortical brain, which in turn can be transmitted, by the coordinated basal movements of performance and listening, to again effect an emotional response via limbic association. A related process underlies even the most casual listener's 'passive' enjoyment of a musical experience. Music's ability to uniquely access deeper, 'older' functional regions of the brain is already harnessed by music therapists to the benefit of many patients who suffer from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other brain-based movement disorders and varieties of dementia.

As our current inability to treat many other brain (especially mental or psychiatric) disorders may result in large part from our lack of understanding of basal- and/or limbic-cortical communication, might study of the neuroscience of music lead to improved understanding and improved therapies? More broadly, the neuroscience of music provides an opportunity to study systemic neural interconnectivity that's not accessible by standard experimental methods and drug development approaches. If (as has been suggested by prominent scientists, entrepreneurs, and life science visionaries) the failed target-based drug discovery process is giving way to a systems biology approach to screening and development, might functional access to basal and limbic activity through music have experimental and therapeutic value beyond those now realized?