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When the Music Stops

While music may soothe the savage breast, the brain thrills to the sound of silence.

That’s a new finding by a team of a Stanford and McGill University scientists who watched brain images of 18 volunteers listening to a series of movements within symphonies, each by frequent pauses.

A one-to two-second break between movements triggers a flurry of mental activity, researchers found. When the music resumes, the action shifts to a different part of the brain, then .

“The pause itself becomes the event,” said neuroscientist Vinod Menon of Stanford’s School of Medicine, the senior author of a paper published in the journal Neuron. “A pause is not a time where nothing happens.”

Skillful composers have long used silence to build a sense of anticipation. Some of music’s finest moments are spent in transition—waiting, in essence, for the other shoe to drop.

Stanford’s snapshots of this pause may have implications beyond concert halls.

They shine a light into what neuroscientists call “segmentation processes” ---the techniques used by the brain to take a stream of sensory information and it into more easily comprehended pieces.

The same processes are thought to be used in other human senses, such as vision.

Because our environment delivers a of information, “the brain needs to segment or chunk the incoming stimulus stream into meaningful units,” Menon said. “The brain needs to extract information about beginnings and endings.”

Volunteers in the Stanford study laid motionless for nine-minute inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine, an enclosed tube surrounded by a powerful magnet. An MRI shows which parts of the brain are working during mental activity.

Vocabulary Focus

waiting for the other shoe to drop (idiom) ---to wait for something expected to happen

shine a light (idiom) ---to help people understand a situation

parcel (something) up (phr. v) ---to take something large and divide it into smaller parts

Specialized terms