placebos

16th October 2009

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Auditory cheesecake?

For anyone interested in some music-related science reading this weekend, neuroscientist Robbin Miranda shared with me her study showing that the neurocognitive model for music is the same as for language. Robbin works closely with Michael Ullman, Stephen Pinker’s colleague and the scientist who coined the declarative/procedural model for language.

Robbin’s most recent work involves a case study of a 31-year-old schizophrenic musician. Her group predicted what type of memory deficits the musician would have and revealed them by manipulating music to analyze memory as they did in the previous study.