Brain: Reading and Listening is wonderful, but not at the same time…

Reading and listening to music at the same time affects how you hear the music. An experiment showed that the subjects judged the music to be less complete with grammatically difficult sentences than with simple sentences. With music and language, it is not about general attention, but about activity in the area of the brain that is shared by music and language. Language and music appear to be fundamentally more alike than you might think. A word in a sentence derives its meaning from the context. The same applies to a tone in a chord sequence or a piece of music. Language and music share the same brain region to create order in both processes: arranging words in a sentence and arranging tones in a chord sequence. Reading and listening at the same time overload the capacity of the brain region (Broca’s area) which is located under the left temple. Musical training enhances language skills, and language training probably enhances the neural processing of music in the same way. But engaging in language and music at the same time remains difficult for everyone, whether you are a professional guitar player or have no musical talent at all.