What is the relationship between music and the brain? A leading theoretician on that topic was Dr. Gordon Shaw (left), who died last month, and was most famous for discovering the so-called Mozart effect (addtional link), which evolved into the folk “meme” which claimed that listening to classical music makes your smarter. Before long, people were playing Mozart to their babies in their cribs. In fact, what Shaw had shown was simply that listening to Mozart improved performance on spatio-temporal tasks for ten minutes.

But the Mozart business overshadowed the immense body of ground-breaking research that Shaw carried out. Working at the University of California at Irvine, Shaw focused on cortical organization, developing his unique, columnarly-based trion model. A list of his papers is on the web site of the MIND Institute, the group Shaw founded to continue his brain research and explore applications to elementary education, in the form of the Math+Music program which combines non-language based computer math games with specialized piano training.

Shaw’s model for the architecture of the cortex was set forth in his paper entitled “Model of cortical organization embodying a basis for a theory of information processing and memory recall.” The abstract states:

Motivated by V. B. Mountcastle’s organizational principle for neocortical function, and by M. E. Fisher’s model of physical spin systems, we introduce a cooperative model of th cortical column incorporating an idealized substructure, the trion, which represents a localized group of neurons. Computer studies reveal that typical networks composed of a small number of trions (with symmetric interactions) exhibit striking behavior—e.g., hundreds to thousands of quasi-stable, periodic firing patterns, any of which can be selected out and enhanced with ony small changes in interaction strengths by using a Hebb-type algorithm.

I’m wondering how Jeff Hawkins managed to write an entire book about cortical architecture without mentioning Shaw’s work.

A particular intriguing aspect of Shaw’s theory is that humans love music because it resonates with the innate columnar cortical structure. Xiaodan Leng then derived music directly from these theories, yielding eerily human-sounding, classical-like pieces; get your MP3s here!

Neurotheologically, what conclusions can we draw from Shaw’s insights? In the West, we think of religion as having a heavy musical component; after all, every cathedral has its organs, and Bach’s “religious” compositions tickle those trions of yours every bit as well as Mozart does, but this focus on music, at least of the cerebral kind, may be peculiar to Christianity. You don’t hear people talking too much about “Buddhist music”. Perhaps in a neurotaxonomy of established religions, Christianity occupies a position closer to the cortex.

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