An introduction to neuroaesthetics for designers. Part 0

Now I'll let you listen fragment of audio recording:

The first is the ordinary sounds of the city
Second – “The Dance of Anitra” by Edvard Grieg

Even if you are not a fan of classical music: why is it that after listening to these two audio recordings and even fully recognizing the sounds, the second brings us more pleasure than the first?

Along with pattern recognition in our brain, another interesting effect manifests itself in full growth:

The neural signal that comes from your auditory nerve when you listen to certain sounds.can be more intense or weaker depending on what kind of sounds you listen to.

When you walk down the street and listen to the buzz of the city around you, the brain filters most of these signals as unimportant. We them we stop noticing.

But when you listen to music, many sounds of different frequencies, being ordered, forming a single rhythm, merge and form single signals, stronger than those that come from ordinary disordered noise.

This can be compared to how if many small signals separately are not able to produce any effect on your brain, but when ordered, forming a rhythm – the neural signal from such sounds will be more intense and many neural impulses emanating from your auditory nerve will (I express myself in as rough and understandable language as possible) roll over your brain, making its way, involving many different parts of it: causing emotions and associations.

Neural signals received from our sensory apparatus, which create synchronized waves of neural impulses that flow through our brain – called spikes.

(In English, spike is a peak - and it was named that way because such brain activity manifests itself on the EEG in peaks like these) — *(In English, spike is a peak – and it was named that way because such brain activity manifests itself on the EEG in peaks like these)*

Important: this term is often used in medicine when diagnosing various forms of epilepsy using EEG – during an attack, patients exhibit excessive or synchronous activity of brain neurons, which can be recorded by multiple spikes on the EEG itself.

The author uses the term “spike” as synchronous neural activity to describe exclusively not pathological brain activity.

Now I used the example of music as the most vivid and understandable reflection of this phenomenon.