The Bimusical Brain

By ⋅ July 18, 2012 ⋅ Post a comment
Photo: Epicleptic via Flickr

Photo: Epicleptic via Flickr

We all think of ourselves as multitaskers. But the ultimate American multitaskers may be the children of foreign-born parents.

Every day, these hyphenated Americans swing back and forth between cultures—in the food they eat, the languages they speak, and the music they listen to.

Take Jason Vinoles. He grew up in New York City, the son of Argentine immigrant parents. Like a lot of children of immigrants, he spoke two languages with his family.

Jason Vinoles (photo: Audrey Quinn)

“I’d be on the phone with my parents and I’ll just switch back and forth,” says Vinoles. “If I can’t think of the word right away in Spanish, I’ll say it in English, but then keep on going with the conversation.”

Vinoles’ family would also switch back and forth between other things American and Argentine: sports team loyalties, cuisines and musical styles. His mom was a big fan of the Beatles.

“Any time a Beatles song would come on the radio on the oldies stations, she’d come grab me and make me dance,” says Vinoles.

The same kitchen floor dance party would also include more traditional Latino music, like the popular Mexican song, Cielito Lindo.

They’d also dance along to Madonna, followed right after by some tango.

A new study out of the Northwestern University focuses on this ‘bimusicality.’ The author, Patrick Wong, specializes in how the brain processes sound.

Wong suspected that people who grew up listening to both the Beatles and tango might develop differently from people who grew up listening to just Western music or just Latin music.

Wong recruited people who grew up listening primarily to Western popular music. And then he selected another group of people– Indian Americans– who grew up listening to both Western music and the traditional music of India.

Wong had his subjects use a dial to indicate the amount of tension they felt in the music.

People tend to report that foreign music has more tension. But the people who grew up with both Western and Indian music felt low degrees of tension with both types of music. They were equally at home listening to either genre.

Wong called these people ‘bimusicals.’

The study participants listened to the music inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, so that Wong could track their brain activity.

“If you are bimusical, you tend to engage a larger network of the brain when you listen to the two kinds of music,” says Wong.

He concluded that people who had grown up with both Indian and Western music had a more elaborate brain system for listening than those who grew up with just Western music.

Wong’s bimusicals also engaged more areas of their brain when listening to music. He says bimusicals looped in not only the auditory areas of the brain, but also its emotional region.

That led Wong to hypothesize that bimusicals may need to engage the emotional part of the brain to differentiate the two types of music.

Wong isn’t saying that only bimusical people experience music emotionally. We all do that. It’s more that bimusicals may tap into that region of the brain in order to toggle between multiple musical styles.

So does the bimusical brain behave similarly to the bilingual brain?

Gigi Luk, who studies bilingual learning at Harvard, has observed signs of enhancements in the brains of people who grow up with two verbal languages.

“ We found a better performance [among bilinguals] in what we call executive functions,” says Luk.

Executive function tasks involve things like planning, problem solving, and multitasking. “We see this advantage across the lifespan from young children to older adults,” she says.

Bilingualism has clear differences from Wong’s bimusicalism. For one thing, speaking a language is more active and involved than listening to music.

Still, Gigi Luk isn’t surprised by Wong’s findings. She believes that all that switching, whether between languages or musical cultures, leaves a physiological impact.

“Our experiences, whether they’re musical or linguistic, actually shape our brain and give us a qualitative difference in brain networks,” says Luk.

There’s still much more to learn about just how that qualitative difference plays out in the bimusical brain. But Patrick Wong believes his research opens a door.

“This is telling us that perhaps being bicultural might change our biology in a fundamental way,” says Wong.

But does that give the bimusical, bicultural mind the same sort of cognitive edge as the bilingual mind? That’s for a future study.

Discussion

3 comments for “The Bimusical Brain”

  • JimDMA

    I have presented some research papers on a related topic, musical meaning. I noticed in the cross-cultural music literature such studies almost always use Western and Indian music. I know of only one study (Fritz et al, 2009) that used music of the Malfa, a culturally isolated North African culture. Even that music appeared to be pentatonic, not terribly alien to western ears. Indian music (Karnataka Sangeeta, for example) uses scalar and rhythmic patterns associated with specific emotional or mood qualities, as does western music (although ragas are not “modes” and tables are not “meters”).

    What about a cross-cultural study, neurological or otherwise, using two or more musics that are radically different? Chinese Opera and Delta Blues, Navajo Yeibechi and Bach organ fugues… what would we see in such a more broadly diverse musical experience? The cliches about “music as universal language” and “music as language of the emotions” are just that” cliches, not empirically supported except in musically-similar studies.

    Any thoughts?

    Jim, DMA

  • Mr_Gone2Rio

    I found this to be a very flawed story. The reporter starts off by describing the experience of people switching between Argentinian and British music — both of which are Western, by the way — and then cites a study involving Indian and Western music. Misleading — she should have found an Indian-American family to use as the example. Then when we hear the Indian music sample that the researcher played for his subjects, she refers to  what we hear as Indian “rhythms.” Clearly, the point was that the Indian musical SCALE is different than what “Western” ears are used to. There was nothing particularly rhythmic in the sample.

    Whatever the researcher discovered is muddled with the reporter’s suggestion that somehow if you don’t grow up bimusical, you don’t recruit the emotional portion of your brain, just the auditory part. Or maybe you do. And then we hear about another study that suggests bilingual people use more of the “executive” function of the brain, which has nothing to do with the emotional portion but hey, it’s kinda interesting, huh?

    Do these two studies actually mean anything other than people with different cultural experiences evidence those experiences in different brain activities? Not really. So what’s the point?

  • Eliezer Pennywhistler

    “Wong had his subjects use a dial to indicate the amount of tension they felt in the music.”

    I am a musician and I have no idea what that means.