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Can neuroscience teach us anything about music?
Hello all Apologies for my absence of late. I was recovering from a surprise dog bite to my right hand which made typing painful and slow. On the plus side I learned a valuable lesson: hands in the air around a dog! I shall be visually demonstrating absolute and total surrender to our canine companions for the near future. Today I have been working on more earworm studies, after a day in and out of the media yesterday. Our group helped to make a documentary about the ‘tune in your head’ phenomenon (earworms) for BBC radio 4 over the last year and it was finally broadcast yesterday. You can catch…
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Musical memory survives against the odds
Today I have been reading a new article with another amazing story of how musical memory can survive in the face of neurological injury and/or illness. These extreme cases are rare, but they tell us something crucial about the nature of musical memory – that it is uniquely vivid and long lasting, as well as being personal for each individual. I have always been convinced that there are great things to be gained by learning more about how musical memory works; so much we can understand about how to maximise memory in general and how to recover memory in difficult cases of dementia and other neurological conditions. Musical memory has…
