By: Juan Pérez Ariza, Natalia Moreno Buitrago, Karun Salvady, Riley Simmonds, Satomi Takamine-Viviano Professor Alexandra Lamont, a renowned music psychology professor from Keele University, delivered a fascinating and instructive overview of music psychology research. However, her emphasis on real-life engagement and fieldwork undertaken in the discipline made her presentation stand out. When music psychology was first presented in the 1950s-60s, it was governed mainly by observing music through cognitive processes examined under highly controlled laboratory conditions. The field’s ideal dem ..read more

By Ceren Ayyildiz, Alicia Kelleher-Clarke, Anthi Georgiadou, Alex Weber, Sean-Lee Duncan Aesthetic Judgement: An Historical Context Have you ever wondered how a piece of operatic music can bring one person to tears and yet make another want to obliterate the source from which the sound is emanating? Or how a pumping EDM track can make one feel as though they are on top of the world and yet make another feel as though they’re going insane? Undoubtedly, these are situations we have all experienced. But do we ever give much thought to the mechanisms underlying such stark contrasts in emotional re ..read more

By Alice Bowmer, Stella Betton, Alfie Lyon-Ray, Lisbeth Sorensen and Jordan Roche Rhythm is a universal experience that most people associate with sounds and movement. For example our heart beats with a pulse, we walk and dance to a beat and our music is made up of lots of different rhythms which can be really complex! In order to understand the structure of these difficult musical rhythms we have to combine our ‘now’ experience with our previous knowledge which is then woven together internally by our brains. Amazingly, despite the wide variety of musics found across the world, there are a fe ..read more

By Austin Coates, Christopher Charlwood, Ellen Murphy, Keerthana Vishwanath, Margot Dehove Have you ever wondered what motivates you throughout your day? Where do our desires and pleasures come from? These highly inter-connected experiences are orchestrated by a set of brain regions known as the reward system. These areas coordinate their action by using a common messenger, or neurotransmitter, called dopamine. After extensive research, the role of dopamine has been more precisely defined. While it plays a part in individuals’ response to pleasure, it has been shown to also have a huge role in ..read more

By Caroline Harbison, Eleanor Matthewman, Eimear North, Miriam Olsen, Amy Rakei We are living longer, that is a fact! In the last 20 years, the average life expectancy in the UK has increased from 78- to 81-years-old, mainly due to advancements in medicine, nutrition and lifestyle. But living longer comes at a cost. This improved life expectancy has caused additional strain on our physical and mental health, and consequently an increase in neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia. Dementia, a syndrome primarily associated with the aged population, is characterised by a decline in brain f ..read more

An Introduction to Musical-Mental Imageries To understand where earworms, academically known as involuntary musical imagery (INMI), come from, Pearson (2013) believes that one must first consider the various types of mental imagery that support the everyday functioning of our mind. He defines mental imagery as the simulation or recreation of perceptual experience in the absence of a corresponding direct external stimulus from the physical environment. This mental simulation, like perception, can be experienced across different senses; for example, the visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, k ..read more

By: Jasmin Galvan, India Haire, Roos Mehrtens, Caroline Rafizadeh Introduction Over 11 million people in the UK experience hearing loss (Report UK, 2015). By 2035, it is thought to affect more than 15 million people in the UK, one in five of us. The two most common causes of hearing loss are age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) and noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). Being exposed to noises above 70 dB over an extended period can be harmful to your ears while noises above 120 dB may cause direct impairments to hearing ability. To put this into perspective, the average noise level in Mancheste ..read more

By: Viviana Caro, Annina Huhtala, Henry Lee, Andrew McNeill, Kate Schwarz “Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away”, wrote John Irving in his enticing novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. But how do memories form in the first place? And could the storyteller be right, does our brain store more than we can actively evoke?  According to current understanding in neuroscience, we are tracking our environment at a rate of milliseconds, whether it be what we see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. This process is fully automatic, mostly unconscious, and we can’t swit ..read more

Written by J’Ana Reed, Phoebe Tsou, Joon Oh, Matt Eitel, and Kate Chard Have you ever wondered what is happening in the brain of the client during therapy? How about the brain of the therapist? What changes in the brain are happening as a session moves forward? Recently, MMB and PANC students were lucky enough to listen to a talk from visiting speaker Dr. Clemens Maidhof – a postdoctoral researcher with the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research. His research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of music and, in his talk, Dr. Maidhof presented his research on music therapy utilising a ..read more

By Caitlin Colapietro, Gabriella Tan, Shin Chien Chua, Sophie Brodtkorb, Valeria Perboni, Zoe Sole   The Neuroaesthetics of Dance Why is dance infectious? Dance is a form of art with the ability to arouse aesthetic experience — a “gratification of senses” by any sensory stimulus (Goldman, 2001). Literature suggests that there is an underlying reason as to why we feel like dancing when we observe dance. However, there is limited research investigating the neural correlates of the aesthetic experience in dance. As one of the first people to conduct research on the neuroaesthetics of dance ..read more