“MUSIC, ESPECIALLY THE MUSIC THAT MOVES US MOST, CAN BOND PEOPLE TOGETHER” wrote the authors of this study who demonstrated (unsurprisingly) that music listener’s cortical brain activity mirrored the music performer’s activity. This study went a step further however to show that the greater the mirroring (‘inter-brain coherence’) the more the listener was “fond of the performance”. The researchers (based in Shanghai, Harbin and Stockholm) used an imaging technique (functional near infra-red spectroscopy) and recorded levels of activity in the…..
SOCIAL ROAD MAPS IN OUR BRAINS. There is firm evidence that our brains use ‘maps’ to understand and work with social relationships – how distant or close individuals are to one another (affiliation) and where we and others sit on our social network (hierarchies and other relationships). The ‘structural school’ of family therapy observed and described this in the nineteen sixties and seventies but now we know some of the basis in brain function for these essential functions and skills……
The link below is to an article which nicely outlines three important presentations of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) – a common form of early onset dementia – dementia which affects people in their 50s and 60s: Behavioural variant FTD; Language variant FTD; Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (motor neurone disease) with FTD. Or read about it in Your Brain in Sickness and in Health: page 66 and descriptions/explanations elsewhere in the book of particular issues with this disorder such as deterioration in social…..