Profs & Pints Alameda: How Music Affects Our Brains

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “How Music Affects Our Brains,” with Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California Davis who has spent more than three decades studying the psychology and neuroscience of music.

[Tickets available only online. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/brain-music .]

Get ready to listen to something truly amazing: A talk on pioneering research on music’s impact on what’s between our ears and how and why it plays with our emotions, sparks memories, and gets stuck in our minds.

Petr Janata, a psychology professor at UC Davis’s Center for Mind and Brain, will discuss the results of research using brain-imaging experiments to study how we perceive and imagine musical sequences and how music interacts with our memories.

We’ll start by examining how our brains follow the dynamic melodic and harmonic structure of music and how and why we perceive “wrong” notes. Surprisingly, research reveals that our memories of musical sequences are embedded in regions of the brain far beyond those parts of the temporal lobe that are associated with processing auditory information. Our brains not only support our imagining of music—our ability to sing a song in our own heads—but also allow music to intertwine with our brain’s representations of self and others, thus laying the foundation for music-evoked remembering.

We’ll look at what goes on in our heads when music plays repeatedly in our minds or a piece of music triggers a vivid memory. You’ll learn about recent studies suggest that “earworms” serve as a mechanism for replaying and storing information absorbed, as well as events experienced, alongside the music. You’ll gain a better understanding of why people with Alzheimer’s disease remain so responsive to music from their past.

Whether you are a musician, music teacher, music therapist, or simply a music fan, you’ll be fascinated by what you hear. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

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