Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist: ‘Music touches every cognitive function there is’

The earliest musical memory that the neuroscientist Robert Zatorre, 70, can summon is The Beatles. He also names The Rolling Stones, The Doors, and The Moody Blues. By the time he entered adolescence he was so enthralled with these bands that he even considered playing the organ: “I thought that if I grew my hair long and played the organ in a rock band, girls would go crazy for me… But it never happened,” says the Buenos Aires-born researcher, a world leader in the neuroscience of music, with amusement. The teenager found an organ teacher, but instead of teaching him rock, the latter introduced him to Johann Sebastian Bach from a church organ. Zatorre was amazed.

He became so enamored with music in those early years that he decided to study it at university and combine it with his other passion: science (he specialized in experimental psychology). In an unusual romance for the time — it was the 1970s — Zatorre, who is currently a professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, took courses from both disciplines, and for his neuropsychology PhD dissertation, he embarked on a path then little explored in science: the impact of music on the brain. “The interesting thing about music is that it touches memory, perception, motor skills, emotions, and reading. It touches everything,” he underscores.

Zatorre speaks to EL PAÍS inside the historic building of the University of Barcelona (UB), just a few hours after being awarded an honorary degree for his pioneering research in the neuroscience of music. His laboratory was one of the first to use neuroimaging to study music and speech, and his research has been key to understanding how our brains allow us to perceive, recognize, and enjoy music. The scientist is also co-founder of the International Research Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound (BRAMS) in Montreal.

The interview takes place in the Ramón y Cajal classroom, a tribute to the Spanish Nobel Prize winner whose work shed light on the structure of the nervous system. “It couldn’t have been more timely,” he smiles.

Question. What does music do to the brain?

Answer. Many things. At first, I focused on the direct part, on auditory perception: we spent 10 years understanding processing, stimuli and their representation in brain areas. But there’s a lot more going on. Music touches every cognitive function there is. For example, I had a student who studied the relationship between sound and movement and discovered that when you listen to certain musical patterns with a certain rhythm, you also see activity in the motor areas. And from that, theories emerged about the links between the motor system and the auditory system, which also explains, for example, why music often makes us dance.

Q. Is it because of that relationship between the auditory and motor parts of the brain?

A. There are very specific connections between those two areas: the motor areas are more connected to the auditory areas than to the visual ones. If you look at a swinging pendulum, you don’t feel like dancing, but if you hear a melody, you start moving. And babies also start moving to sounds a few weeks after birth. It’s probably something innate that we develop over time.

Q. You have also studied why music gives us pleasure.

A. Many people have that feeling when they listen to very emotional music: you feel like your hair stands on end, you shudder; some people also cry or get chills. We discovered that the areas of the brain that are most activated are what’s called the reward circuit, which had already been identified many years before with more basic stimuli, such as food or sexual stimuli. But all of that was necessary for survival, while music wasn’t.

Q. What are the hypotheses that try to explain what music means to us?

A. One of the hypotheses that I think has a lot of evidence is that the reward system and the brain in general are like a prediction machine; it’s an active system that’s always looking for something and always predicting what’s going to happen. That’s where all the reward learning comes from. And music is like a microcosm of the environment: you hear some sounds and your brain is going to make predictions about what the next sound will be. So, if I play a simple scale: C, D, E, F, G, B... you already know that C is going to come next. And if an F-sharp comes along instead, it sounds wrong. Music is a way to exploit that capacity we have for prediction. When we’re composing, we’re always looking for a balance between something new and something that also has predictive value; it can’t be something completely random.

Q. But what is the meaning of music from an evolutionary perspective?

A. That’s more theoretical or speculative. The hypothesis is that music perhaps emerged as a coincidence — our auditory system is highly developed and has this ability to predict sounds, and that in turn generates pleasure. But once it developed, it turned out to have quite important value, because it can produce pleasure in other individuals, generate social bonds between them, and it’s a way to activate social networks. Music is one of the things that unites and also separates one group from another. Teenagers, for example, never listen to the music their parents liked; they listen to the music of their group, and it’s a way for them to unite and dissociate from the previous generation.

Q. Not everyone has the same ear for music, nor the same appetite, taste, and amount of time they dedicate to it. Why is this?

A. With my colleagues at the UB, we started to think about whether everyone likes music. And we discovered that there’s a group of people, between 2% and 4% of the population, who don’t get any pleasure from listening to music and don’t understand why everyone else is so crazy about it. And these are people who don’t have other difficulties in the reward system. Because there are people, for example, with depression, Parkinson’s, or generalized anhedonia, who already have difficulties in the reward system and don’t appreciate almost anything because they don’t feel pleasure. But these people are not like that; they have perfectly normal lives, it’s just that music simply doesn’t speak to them. We studied them and saw that, physiologically, they have a more reduced connection between the areas of the auditory cortex and the reward circuits.

Q. Can you live without music?

A. It’s not that one can’t live without music, but I think it would be a very unpleasant life. Music isn’t necessary for survival, but it is for well-being.

Q. Some people with dementia, when you play a song, suddenly connect with it and get emotional. What role does music play in memory?

A. The activation of the reward system, which is based on dopamine, is also closely related to memory. Because reward reinforces learning. So, any situation in which the reward system is activated through dopamine influences the formation of memories. Throughout life, we listen to songs, and if they are very pleasant songs, whatever is happening at that moment will form a very strong memory.

Q. Since when has music had an impact? There was a time when it became fashionable to put headphones on pregnant women’s bellies so the fetuses could listen to music.

A. The auditory system develops quite early, and a fetus can hear sounds by seven months. But it’s a stretch to deduce from this that hearing Bach music in the womb will make you turn out brilliant. And there’s another problem: no matter how many speakers you turn on, the child is bathed in amniotic fluid, which absorbs most frequencies, so the baby would only hear low frequencies.

Q. Can music be therapeutic?

A. Yes, there are many applications. What’s interesting to me is that music therapy has changed significantly and is heavily based on scientific knowledge. Thirty years ago, it was almost like psychodynamics, like doing talk therapy with a patient, but with a guitar. Now, clinical trials and experiments with music therapy are being conducted.

Q. Can you give me an example of where music therapy works?

A. I was very impressed by what some Finnish experts were doing with a group of people with aphasia [inability to understand or formulate language]. Since they couldn’t speak, they were being taught to sing and they all sing in a choir together. It’s not that they sing wonderfully well because they also have vocalization problems, but when they start singing, they’re happy. That [exercise] helps develop the motor skills of the vocal cords, and they can articulate a little better. But I think the most important value is the emotional, psychological value.

Q. After 40 years of research, what do you think is the fundamental role of music for humans? To make us happy?

A. It goes beyond simply raising our level of happiness. It’s deeper than that. It’s something that can unite us and is a way to communicate and express emotions.

Q. Are there still any unresolved questions that concern you?

A. The function of certain regions is relatively well understood, whether it’s the perceptual, emotional, motor, or memory areas. What’s not well understood now is how they interact with each other, exactly what the connections are and how they develop, to what extent they are already determined by genetics or can change with learning. I’d like to better understand how these relationships work because there’s no specific brain area dedicated to music. To return to Ramón y Cajal’s ideas: it’s a network.

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