[CS] TODAY: "Music, Brain and Culture" - Jamshed Bharucha, 5:30 p.m. in ELH

[Paula Harmon]

Public Lecture: "Music, Brain and Culture"
by Jamshed Bharucha
Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University as well as 
Professor in the Psychology Department.

5:30 pm in Franklin Patterson Hall, East Lecture Hall

Bharucha is Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University as 
well as Professor in the Psychology Department. His research is on 
the perception of music, using computational neural net modeling and 
brain imaging techniques. He has co-developed two successful software 
products for teaching. Bharucha is a Trustee of the International 
Foundation for Music Research and was Editor of the interdisciplinary 
journal Music Perception.

LECTURE ABSTRACT: Culture is learned automatically by the brain. The 
brain then uses this implicit knowledge to filter subsequent 
perception through "cultural lenses". This is true of all aspects of 
culture, including music. Our brains internalize the structural 
patterns and emotional associations that are pervasive in the musical 
cultures to which we are exposed. My students and I tested this 
hypothesis with brain imaging using functional magnetic resonance 
(fMRI). We tracked the brain activity of volunteers from India and 
the United States while they listened to samples of Indian and 
Western music, as well as samples of spoken Hindi and English. Our 
results suggest that for both music and language, the brain responds 
differently to music that is culturally familiar than to music that 
is culturally unfamiliar, although the results are more complex for 
music than for language. In my talk I will also critique the 
co-called "Mozart effect" - the belief that listening to Mozart or 
other forms of music affects the brain in ways that affect spatial 
reasoning and other non-musical cognitive skills.

For more information on Bharucha, visit 
http://www.tufts.edu/sackler/facultyIntros/bharuchaJ.html

This lecture is sponsored by Hampshire College's Program in Culture, 
Brain, and Development  http://cbd.hampshire.edu

-- 
Paula Harmon, Coordinator
Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College Program in 
Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD)
Adele Simmons Hall, Room 100
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002
phone: 413-559-5501; fax: 413-559-5438
email: cbd at hampshire.edu
http://cbd.hampshire.edu
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