Electrical impulses travel through the auditory nerve to various positioning processing stations in the brain. The auditory cortex (part of the ‘grey matter’) is where most of the sorting, processing, and filing of information is carried out.
Damage to this area will cause a loss of subtle awareness to sounds but reflexive response will remain.
At the same time, there is also plenty of communication between the right and left temporal lobes so that signals can be compared. The comparisons and analyses made play a role in suppressing background noise and in allowing a person to focus on the sounds he/she wants to hear.
THE PRIMARY (AUDITORY) CORTEX
In the rat, sounds are organised into 2 fields, In the rhesus monkey, sounds are organised into 15 fields (or channels). It is not known how many are available in humans, but it will be higher than 15… It would be useful if we could mimic these fields…
THE SECONDARY CORTEX in combination with other regions, may be involved in the processing of complex social harmonic, melodic and rhythmic patterns.
THE TERTIARY CORTEX seamlessly integrates and combines everything into the overall experience of rich complex sound (music) – linked to pleasure and enjoyment
The right auditory cortex has long been shown to be more sensitive to tonality
(music, tuning an engine, etc), while the left auditory cortex has been shown to
be more sensitive to minute sequential differences in sound, specifically speech.
The Rostromedial prefrontal cortex is tonality sensitive - it is activated by the tones and frequencies of resonant sounds and music. It’s also believed to integrate emotional,
cognitive and visceral information. (The Medial prefrontal cortex) is thought to be the core developmental difference between the naughty child / impulsive teenager and the
calm, mature and reasoned adult. And may aid in the inhibition of negative emotion. It could be hypothesized that this is the mechanism by which music lifts the soul!
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