December 2001

Welcome to the Alite newsletter, December 2001

If you are preparing for your Christmas concert, you may be interested - or possibly very surprised! - to read Alistair Smith's item which explains that we are all musical. We also have information about stress in pregnancy and hyperactivity, and the results of some research into the development of the adolescent brain and the implications for language learning.

Hyperactive?

Women who suffer from high levels of anxiety during pregnancy are twice as likely to have a hyperactive child. According to research on 7,000 women published in September 2001 by Professor Vivette Glover at Imperial College London, boys were more likely to suffer hyperactivity. The incidence was about one in twenty boys, but in women who were highly anxious in pregnancy the figure was nearer one in ten.

Stress for the mother means stress for the foetus. Stress hormones such as Cortisol are released into the bloodstream. Cortisol raises resting heart rate and affects other vital functions as part of the fight or flight response. Exposure in the womb to excessive cortisol could cause problems later in life such as hypertension, quicker stress responses, and impaired cognitive abilities.

Growth Spurts

Research conducted on the west coast of the US has found further valuable evidence about the development of the adolescent brain. Using MRI scans from children of normal health aged between 3 to 15 years, Dr Paul Thompson and his colleagues at UCLA found that children's brains develop in a specific pattern. The researchers scanned the children's brains at intervals ranging from two weeks to four years, which allowed them to follow changes in their brains. The team detected striking, spatially complex patterns of growth and tissue loss in the developing human brain.

They identified a spurt of growth that starts in the front of the brain from ages 3 to 6. Between the ages 6 and 13, the researchers found that the pattern of rapid growth moves from the front to the back, toward the areas of the brain that are specialised for language skills. The researchers also found that growth rates in an area of the brain linked to language were slow between the ages of three and six but speeded up from six to 15 years when fine tuning of language usually occurs. The ability to learn new languages declines rapidly after the age of 12 years, as does the ability to recover language function if linguistic areas in one brain hemisphere are surgically resected.

We are all musical!

Auditions for the Sunday school choir took place in formidable circumstances. The supervisor would line you all up and then listen to you one at a time as you sang. As you were only 10 years old at the time it was highly stressful especially as one or two of us were encouraged to mime rather than actually sing when the choir eventually performed.

A common belief about music is that only a few of us are "musical", and that being musical is a 'gift'. The brain research suggests otherwise! Most of our capabilities are not even known to us. They occur in the brain at an unconscious level, so although someone like me will indulge the Sunday school teacher and believe that I have no musical ability, I can never be certain - and isn't that a great thing?

Adults who had no musical education and who had never attempted to play a musical instrument were given a series of chords, which infrequently contained a chord that did not fit the key implied by the chord sequence. They did not know about chords or key structures and they had no formal musical education and scant musical knowledge.

When Stefan Koelsch and his research team from Leipzig, analysed brain activation they found a definite pattern of recognition. When all the chords belonged to the same key, their brains showed no special response. When one of the chords did not fit the key that was implied and unconsciously abstracted in their brains, it produced a response which was marked. Puzzled by this, the team repeated the experiment again and again and found the pattern was 'this chord doesn't fit the key'. The brain response occurred although the subjects had no musical training nor did they know about keys nor did they know about the belongingness of chords to keys. Their conclusion was that the brain itself seems to make musical sense out of sounds automatically, without prompting and at a level out of conscious awareness.

We are all musical!