MUSIC may be more like language than we realised, evoking memories of meaningful concepts, and not just emotional responses.
Stefan Koelsch’s team at the Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, showed that excerpts of classical music can activate or “prime” memories of related words or concepts in just the same way that sentences or word lists do. Brain responses to the music were indistinguishable from the responses to sentences, the team reports in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn1197).
It is clear that music can encode some meaning by tapping into our emotions. We also…
