Minds.com

Some people are just born musically challenged. The Journal of Neuroscience is reporting on the reason why some people cannot sing in tune. Ten percent of the population has a faulty brain wiring that keeps them from telling the difference between musical notes. The brain region, dubbed the “highway,” links music and language centers to voice production. This area, the arcuate fasciculus as it’s known, was not only smaller in tone deaf people, but the upper portion was actually missing.

You can take the tone deaf test here: http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/tunetest/dtt.asp.

On the opposite side, some people have a remarkable talent known as perfect pitch. They are able to identify any note on the spot without a reference. Of course, perfect pitch is rare. Some estimates have said that 1 out of 10,000 people have this ability. But among special populations like autistic people, 3 out of five 5 can identify notes like the back of their hand. This has been linked to unusual brain structure that is evident even before birth. People that have perfect pitch have more asymmetric brains. The temporal lobe that is responsible for auditory processing is usually larger on the left side of human brains. Perfect pitch possessors have an even larger left side when compared to their right. But even if people are born with this feature, they need to have been musically trained to have pitch naming ability.

No matter how hard people train, most people cannot learn to identify notes. This means perfect pitch is hard wired from the beginning.

We tend to view the mind as an intellectual abstraction, while the brain is a biological organ much like the heart or lungs.  We refer to the mind a result of all of our thinking processes – the choices we make, our style of conversation, how fast we can add and subtract, and our logic and reasoning. The mind is one huge metaphor. I have dissected a brain in anatomy class but can you dissect a mind? The mind is complex and thought of highly as the process that separates man from animal.  We all may have heard of the movie “The Beautiful Mind” but we usually do not hear about “The Beautiful Brain.” (Actually, I remember a student standing not too far away from me during dissection who saw the sheep brain, with its perfect colors and contours, and said “Wow, what a beautiful brain!”) The brain and spinal cord are the control centers of the human body.  Vital functions such as our temperature, heartbeat, and breathing are ultimately regulated by the brain in the cerebellum region.  The cerebellum, that lower part of brain that looks like cauliflower in pictures, can be thought of as the primitive brain which controls life functions. Now all the way to the front of the brain is the cerebrum near where your forehead is located. This is known as the intellectual brain. When we refer to the mind, we refer to the processes of the cerebrum. This is the bridge connection between brain and mind.