Source: diveintomark’s twitter tweats

1.
The boys are having a pillow throwing contest. I can’t imagine how this could possibly get out of hand.

2.
The tweet is coming from inside the pillow fort. I repeat: the tweets are coming from INSIDE THE PILLOW FORT.

3. (about an hour later)
Update: the attack has been rebuffed, the pillow fort has been razed, and a peace treaty has been forged. It involves ice cream.

(In case you wonder what this has to do with piano or music or teaching or learning – absolutely nothing.)

an abstract from an article by Isabelle Peretz, Elvira Brattico, Miika Jarvenpaa, and Mari Tervaniemi in Brain. A Journal of Neurology

Like language, music engagement is universal, complex and present early in life. However, ~4% of the general population experiences a lifelong deficit in music perception that cannot be explained by hearing loss, brain damage, intellectual deficiencies or lack of exposure. This musical disorder, commonly known as tone-deafness and now termed congenital amusia, affects mostly the melodic pitch dimension. Congenital amusia is hereditary and is associated with abnormal grey and white matter in the auditory cortex and the inferior frontal cortex. In order to relate these anatomical anomalies to the behavioural expression of the disorder, we measured the electrical brain activity of amusic subjects and matched controls while they monitored melodies for the presence of pitch anomalies. Contrary to current reports, we show that the amusic brain can track quarter-tone pitch differences, exhibiting an early right-lateralized negative brain response. This suggests near-normal neural processing of musical pitch incongruities in congenital amusia. It is important because it reveals that the amusic brain is equipped with the essential neural circuitry to perceive fine-grained pitch differences. What distinguishes the amusic from the normal brain is the limited awareness of this ability and the lack of responsiveness to the semitone changes that violate musical keys. These findings suggest that, in the amusic brain, the neural pitch representation cannot make contact with musical pitch knowledge along the auditory-frontal neural pathway.

So, in essence, and pushing this issue a bit further:  this is like autism with regard to music?  Just like an individual with autism who can perfectly well see and hear – but then doesn’t know what to do with this sensory input (what does it mean when someone “smiles”??), an individual with an amusic brain can hear and distinguish musical details just as well as everyone else – but what is being heard has no meaning because there is no “contact with music pitch knowledge” due to a “lack of responsiveness”.

The question, as always, is:  what do we do – now that we know?