That stuff on sound/music and the "grammar of morality" is very interesting, especially when taken together.
A researcher at UCSD (I believe) whose name currently escapes me (I have it around here somewhere) found that when a person hears a grammatically incorrect sentence, a language center in the brain (Broca's area) fires the same response as when he hears a discordant note in a musical sequence, which would basically be the musical equivalent of bad grammar.
At that point, I think it's fair to question whether Broca's area is just a language center, or rather one that is meant to process highly ordered, sequential patterns, one specifically geared toward auditory patterns (though maybe not totally limited to them -- who knows). There are certainly other brain areas that act similarly (mirror neurons in the prefrontal cortex come to mind).
One idea I always wanted to explore thoroughly was whether Broca's area would see the same response in a discordant moral situation. It would take some time to get a procedure that could adequately isolate the moral component, but it certainly seems possible.
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A researcher at UCSD (I believe) whose name currently escapes me (I have it around here somewhere) found that when a person hears a grammatically incorrect sentence, a language center in the brain (Broca's area) fires the same response as when he hears a discordant note in a musical sequence, which would basically be the musical equivalent of bad grammar.
At that point, I think it's fair to question whether Broca's area is just a language center, or rather one that is meant to process highly ordered, sequential patterns, one specifically geared toward auditory patterns (though maybe not totally limited to them -- who knows). There are certainly other brain areas that act similarly (mirror neurons in the prefrontal cortex come to mind).
One idea I always wanted to explore thoroughly was whether Broca's area would see the same response in a discordant moral situation. It would take some time to get a procedure that could adequately isolate the moral component, but it certainly seems possible.
Comment status: comments have been closed. Baseball Toaster is now out of business.