According to a new study, the human brain can tell a familiar song from an unfamiliar song in the blink of an eye.
Are you good at recognizing a song? It's normal, your brain is a real war machine, hitting the "buzzer" long before you realize what you're listening to. Evidenced by this new study signed by researchers from University College London, the results of which have been published in Scientific Reports .
Researchers at UCL have indeed recently sought to find out how quickly our brains can react to familiar music. With their work, they also studied the brain processes allowing this reactivity. For this small study, they recruited 22 people.
In this sample, five men and five women were asked to come up with five songs that were very familiar to them. The researchers then looked for other songs that were very similar, but unknown to the participants (same tempo, same notes, same instrumentation, etc.).
These ten people were then invited to listen to one hundred sub-second excerpts of their familiar songs and those they did not know. Meanwhile, the researchers used an electroencephalogram to analyze electrical activity in each brain. A pupillometer was used to measure the diameter of the pupils.
Then it emerged that all of the participants responded to their familiar melodies within 100 to 300 milliseconds. This resulted in suddenly "lit up" cortical activity and dilated pupils, which is a sign of arousal. The control group made up of eleven people who did not know any of the proposed songs, on the other hand, did not present any activity, whether ocular or cerebral.
"Our results demonstrate that recognition of known music is remarkably fast “, explains Maria Chait, lead author of the study. "These findings confirm the profound hold that very familiar pieces of music can have on our memory “.
Even though it is very small, this study could nevertheless prove useful in the treatment of several pathologies.
“There is growing interest in exploiting music in patients with dementia for whom memory for music appears to be well preserved despite systemic failure of memory systems "explains the researcher, for example. “Identifying the neural pathway and processes that support music identification may provide a clue to understanding the basis of this phenomenon e".
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