That's music to my auditory cortex

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON BEYONCE. (COURTESY OF CONWAY LAB, NIH)

We’re quite similar in many ways to our monkey relatives, but speech and music are thought to be unique to us. And according to a new study, it turns out that our need to understand those sounds has influenced how our brains are organized. For the research, scientists used fMRI to track the brain activity of people and macaques as they listened to an array of sounds, some of which were just noise and some of which had pitch — the harmonic tones we need to pick up on to decipher speech and music. They found that people’s auditory cortexes were more attuned to harmonic tones than the monkeys’, suggesting our brains changed in order to perceive speech and music.