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LINKSWe Got the Music In Us
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Music is a universal part of the human experience. It saturates our lives, and exists in every human society we have ever discovered. But a great unanswered question about music is why?
Is music a cultural artefact, that we've created using the luxury of our large brains, or is it part of our biology, perhaps as a capability that gave us an evolutionary advantage, and so was preserved. Scientists are just starting to investigate these questions.
Dr Robert Zatorre is a Professor of Neurosciene at the Montreal Neurological Insitute of McGill University. He's used brain scanning technology to investigate whether there are specific tissues in the brain devoted to music.
Dr Isabelle Peretz, of the department of Psychology at the University of Montreal has investigated people with brain injuries that have resulted in an inability to perceive music, which implies there are such tissues.
Dr Christo Pantev, Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Human Cortical Plasticity, has been studying the way the brain changes with exposure to music, and as it learns music.
Dr David Huron is a Canadian researcher who is a composer, a professor of music and head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Lab at Ohio State University. He's investigated some of the issues around whether music is an evolutionary adaptation.
Dr Laurel Trainor is a professor of psychology at McMaster University, and directs the Infant Auditory Lab and she suspects music evolved as a way for infants and their mothers to communicate.
 A comparison of our solar system and 55 cancri (photo courtesy NASA) |
Earlier this week, scientists from NASA announced the discovery of 15 new planets. Among them was a planet circling the star 55 Cancri. But this planet differed from those we've found before. It was about the size of Jupiter, and in an orbit about the same distance from the star, as Jupiter is from our Sun. Dr. Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution in Washington explains why this planet is so special.
Imagine life without teeth. You'd be stuck eating a diet of soup and soft mush. Thankfully our vertebrate ancestors developed teeth and jaws fairly early on in their evolution. But we know very little about how or why teeth developed. Dr. Mark Purnell from the University of Leicester thinks they originally appeared as a way to keep things out of the mouth, in a group of prehistoric slime suckers.
Dr Jackie Duffin, Hannah professor of the History of Medicine and hematologist at Queen's University tells us about her latest scoop: the rediscovery of the 16th century author of the "Coles Notes" for diagnostic medicine.
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