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Abstract:
Participants of Indian or American origin were scanned with
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to
Indian and Western pop and classical music, and to fluent speech in
Hindi and English. All Indian subjects reported being familiar with
both Indian and Western pop music; some reported familiarity with
Indian or Western classical music; and all understood both Hindi
and English. None of the American subjects was familiar with Indian
pop or classical music, and none understood Hindi. There was clear
evidence of culturally induced neural adaptation to spoken
language: English activated the temporal lobe more strongly than
Hindi for the Western subjects. There was no analogous overall
advantage for English for the Indian subjects, reflecting their
knowledge of both languages. For the Western subjects, Western
music elicited stronger temporal lobe activation than did Indian
music, with a leftward asymmetry for Western classical and a
rightward asymmetry for Western pop. Multidimensional scaling of
inter-subject correlations of activation patterns revealed that the
neural response to music was more uniform for the Western subjects
than for the Indian subjects, reflecting the Indian subjects'
adaptation to the musics of both cultures. The brain thus adapts to
the music and speech of one's culture. These adapted circuits
respond to, and enable the recognition of, culturally familiar
auditory stimuli.
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