Science Writing Competition: How does the brain process rhythm?
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Abstract
A region of the brain called the putamen has a central role in our ability to keep a beat in our head.
Main text
This article by Elizabeth Kirkham (pictured) was the winning entry in the Access to Understanding science-writing competition for PhD students and early career post-doctoral researchers organized by Europe PubMed Central in partnership with The British Library. Entrants were asked to explain to a non-scientific audience, in less than 800 words, the research reported in a scientific article and why it mattered.
Most people have little trouble recognising and following the beat in a piece of music. We can even continue to play the beat in our minds once a song has finished. However, few of us are aware that our knack for holding a beat in our head actually makes life easier. The capacity to identify patterns in streams of sound supports many forms of human behaviour, including moving, speaking and listening.
If the ability to generate this internal rhythm is disrupted, such as in Parkinson’s disease, problems begin to arise. People with Parkinson’s disease have difficulty with psychological tasks, such as holding a beat in their head, as well as with practical tasks, such as walking. The more we know about the regions of the brain that are causing these difficulties, the more effective we will be in designing treatments to combat them. Previous research suggests that a set of brain structures known as the basal ganglia have a role in identifying and following a beat.
The more we know about the regions of the brain that are causing these difficulties, the more effective we will be in designing treatments to combat them.
The basal ganglia are a network of brain regions that are involved in movement and action. Many of the regions within the basal ganglia appear to play a role in the processing of rhythm. One such region is the putamen, a round structure near the centre of the brain. Studies measuring levels of brain activity have found that the putamen is active when a person is listening to a beat. However, it is not clear whether the putamen is merely identifying the presence of the beat, or whether it is actually helping us to recreate that beat in our minds.
Jessica Grahn of the University of Western Ontario and James Rowe of Cambridge University and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, also in Cambridge, designed a study that allowed them to distinguish between these two possibilities (Grahn and Rowe, 2013). They began by creating small snippets of sound. Some of these sound-bites contained a beat, while others did not. Then they combined pairs of sound-bites to produce four different types of sequences: in the first sequence a sound-bite without a beat was followed by a different sound-bite without a beat; in the second a sound-bite without a beat was followed by one with a beat; in the third a sound-bite with a beat was followed by a one with a version of the same beat; and in the fourth sequence a sound-bite with a beat was followed by a sound-bite with a faster or slower version of the same beat.
Grahn and Rowe asked the participants in their study to listen to the different sequences whilst a scanner measured how their brain responded. In order to measure this brain activity, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This is a form of brain imaging that allows us to see which regions of the brain are involved in a particular task: it does this by measuring the amount of oxygen that a specific region of the brain is using relative to other regions. If a brain region is using a lot of oxygen during a task, it is assumed that it is involved in carrying out the task.
Grahn and Rowe found that the putamen responded differently to different beat sequences. When there was no beat, the putamen was not active. Similarly, when participants heard a new beat, the putamen did not respond. By contrast, when participants heard the same beat twice, the putamen was highly active. It was also active, but to a lesser extent, when the sequence involved the same beat played at different speeds.
These results suggest that the putamen was not responding to the presence of a beat per se, but was processing the continuation of the beat across the sequence. This supports the theory that the putamen is involved in our ability to recreate a beat in our head. Prior to this study, researchers knew that the putamen was involved in beat processing, but they did not know what its specific role was. The work of Grahn and Rowe shows that the putamen is important for the mental generation of a beat.
In addition to advancing our knowledge of the putamen’s role in beat processing, these findings could have clinical implications. People with Parkinson’s disease are capable of identifying a beat in a piece of music, but have difficulty when it comes to reproducing the beat in their own minds. This study shows that this pattern of symptoms could be caused by damage to the putamen, thus highlighting the need to consider this part of the brain as a target for future treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
References
Article and author information
Author details
Publication history
Copyright
© 2014, Kirkham
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,408
- views
-
- 92
- downloads
-
- 0
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Science Writing Competition: How does the brain process rhythm?
eLife 3:e02658.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.02658
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Time estimation is an essential prerequisite underlying various cognitive functions. Previous studies identified ‘sequential firing’ and ‘activity ramps’ as the primary neuron activity patterns in the medial frontal cortex (mPFC) that could convey information regarding time. However, the relationship between these patterns and the timing behavior has not been fully understood. In this study, we utilized in vivo calcium imaging of mPFC in rats performing a timing task. We observed cells that showed selective activation at trial start, end, or during the timing interval. By aligning long-term time-lapse datasets, we discovered that sequential patterns of time coding were stable over weeks, while cells coding for trial start or end showed constant dynamism. Furthermore, with a novel behavior design that allowed the animal to determine individual trial interval, we were able to demonstrate that real-time adjustment in the sequence procession speed closely tracked the trial-to-trial interval variations. And errors in the rats’ timing behavior can be primarily attributed to the premature ending of the time sequence. Together, our data suggest that sequential activity maybe a stable neural substrate that represents time under physiological conditions. Furthermore, our results imply the existence of a unique cell type in the mPFC that participates in the time-related sequences. Future characterization of this cell type could provide important insights in the neural mechanism of timing and related cognitive functions.
-
- Neuroscience
Sour taste, which is elicited by low pH, may serve to help animals distinguish appetitive from potentially harmful food sources. In all species studied to date, the attractiveness of oral acids is contingent on concentration. Many carboxylic acids are attractive at ecologically relevant concentrations but become aversive beyond some maximal concentration. Recent work found that Drosophila ionotropic receptors IR25a and IR76b expressed by sweet-responsive gustatory receptor neurons (GRNs) in the labellum, a peripheral gustatory organ, mediate appetitive feeding behaviors toward dilute carboxylic acids. Here, we disclose the existence of pharyngeal sensors in Drosophila melanogaster that detect ingested carboxylic acids and are also involved in the appetitive responses to carboxylic acids. These pharyngeal sensors rely on IR51b, IR94a, and IR94h, together with IR25a and IR76b, to drive responses to carboxylic acids. We then demonstrate that optogenetic activation of either Ir94a+ or Ir94h+ GRNs promotes an appetitive feeding response, confirming their contributions to appetitive feeding behavior. Our discovery of internal pharyngeal sour taste receptors opens up new avenues for investigating the internal sensation of tastants in insects.
