THE EFFECT OF MOZART’S MUSIC IN SEVERE EPILEPSY: FUNCTIONAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES

Music is a very important factor in everyday life, involving mood, emotions and memories. The effect of music on the brain is very debated. Certainly, music activates a complex network of neurones in auditory areas, mesolimbic areas, cerebellum and multisensory areas. In particular, music exerts its effects on the brain of patients with epilepsy, having a dichotomous influence: it can either be seizure-promoting in musicogenic epilepsy or antiepileptic. Several studies have shown that seizure-prone neural networks may be stimulated by certain periodicities while other frequencies may prevent seizure activity. There are a lot of data in the literature about the so-called "Mozart effect" (Rauscher et al. 1993). In previous studies we observed that in institutionalized subjects with severe/profound intellectual disability and drug-resistant epilepsy, a systematic music listening protocol reduced the frequency of seizures in about 50% of the cases. In this study we are conducting a survey on the observation of what happens to the brain of patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy through electroencephalographic investigations, brain MRI and behavioural analysis before and after six months of listening to Mozart music (Sonata K.448). The first step is to present the data of the first patient under investigation

Neocortical substrates of feelings evoked with music in the ACC, insula, and somatosensory cortex

Neurobiological models of emotion focus traditionally on limbic/paralimbic regions as neural substrates of emotion generation, and insular cortex (in conjunction with isocortical anterior cingulate cortex, ACC) as the neural substrate of feelings. An emerging view, however, highlights the importance of isocortical regions beyond insula and ACC for the subjective feeling of emotions. We used music to evoke feelings of joy and fear, and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to decode representations of feeling states in functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) data of n = 24 participants. Most of the brain regions providing information about feeling representations were neocortical regions. These included, in addition to granular insula and cingulate cortex, primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, premotor cortex, frontal operculum, and auditory cortex. The multivoxel activity patterns corresponding to feeling representations emerged within a few seconds, gained in strength with increasing stimulus duration, and replicated results of a hypothesis-generating decoding analysis from an independent experiment. Our results indicate that several neocortical regions (including insula, cingulate, somatosensory and premotor cortices) are important for the generation and modulation of feeling states. We propose that secondary somatosensory cortex, which covers the parietal operculum and encroaches on the posterior insula, is of particular importance for the encoding of emotion percepts, i.e., preverbal representations of subjective feeling.publishedVersio

The Behavioral and Neural Effects of Audiovisual Affective Processing

In everyday life, we receive affective information from a multisensory environment. What we see and what we hear jointly influence how we feel, think and act. Outstanding questions still remain about the essential behavioral and neural mechanism underlying how we combine visual and auditory affective signals. In this dissertation, I report a series of behavioral, EEG and fMRI experiments addressing this question. I found behaviorally there are congruency, visual dominance, and negativity dominance effects. Using ERPs, I showed that these behavioral effects can map onto different time course in audiovisual affective processing. Time-frequency analyses of EEG data showed that there are early sub-additive evoked theta, long-lasting supra-additive induced delta and beta activities. Meta-analysis of previous neuroimaging studies revealed the role of superior temporal cortex, amygdala, and thalamus in audiovisual affective processing. In an fMRI study, brain areas associated with audiovisual affective congruence and valence processing were identified, wherein superior temporal and anterior cingulate cortices have roles in both processes. Representational similarity analyses revealed modality-general brain areas that are sensitive to valence from both visual and auditory modalities; and modality-specific brain areas that are sensitive to either visual or auditory emotions. Together these convergent findings advance our understanding of behavioral and neural effects of audiovisual affective processing