音乐半球的神经心理学.pdfVIP

Dispatch R125 Neuropsychology: Music of the hemispheres Lauren Stewart* and Vincent Walsh† Music may be the food of love but it is also good fodder that music can be viewed as a functionally distinct process for cognitive scientists. Here we highlight a recent study that requires a unique set of cognitive operations [5,6]. of a neuropsychological patient who has lost her ability The questions for cognitive neuroscience concern the na- to read music, but not text, in the absence of any other ture of these cognitive operations and how they are instan- musical deficit. tiated in the brain. Addresses: *Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK. †Department of Experimental That musical ability can be fractionated is well known to Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. the musical community: Thomas Beecham, for example, E-mail: l.stewart@ucl.ac.uk; vin@psy.ox.ac.uk defined a musicologist as “someone who can read music but not hear it”. More formal demonstrations of dissociations of Current Biology 2001, 11:R125–R127 musical function have come from the amusia literature, 0960-9822/01/$ – see front matter where selective deficits in music perception, performance, © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. reading or writing have been documented [7]. But selective