What would Christmas be without music? Unimaginable. In a department store, in a church or while drinking coffee at home - no matter where we hear them, everyone recognizes the well-known Christmas carols immediately. 

 

Oh Tannenbaum again - but this time in a different key. Nevertheless, every child recognizes this melody. How this is possible is a question that scientists all over the world are working on. Petr Janata from Dartmouth University in the USA, for example:

 

Psychologists have known for a long time that we have an idea of keys. But the question remains, where in our brain is stored the knowledge about the basic structure of music? 

 

The basic structure of our Western music is the different keys. And somehow our brain has understood that. Even without musical training, it recognizes that a melody must follow the rules of a particular key. Petr Janata has investigated how our brain does this.

 

We have composed a melody that systematically runs through all major and minor keys. We played this melody to our test subjects while they were in a magnetic resonance tomograph. This way we could take pictures of their brain. We could see in these images how the activity in certain areas of the brain follows our music. 

 

The music in our head plays directly behind our forehead. More precisely, in the rostromedial prefrontal cortex. This special brain region is closely related to the emotional center. No wonder we tend to become sentimental when listening to such sounds.

 

However, this is not the case for all people. In some cultures completely different sounds are necessary to arouse emotions. Janata:

 

One of the most basic tasks of our brain is to grasp the fundamental structure of our environment - for example, the fundamental structure in the music we hear. But when people are constantly exposed to music that follows other rules, their brain learns those rules. But the areas in the brain that store this kind of knowledge are in the same brain region for people in all cultures. 

 

Babies are still open to all kinds of music. In adults, researchers can find out which musical culture someone grew up in by measuring brain activity alone. Another result also surprised the scientists: the same melody triggers different activation patterns in the brain. Maybe it's because music stimulates us to be creative.

 

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