The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 5.2, Subcortical Involvement in Motivation

In the previous post in my blog series on Pessoa's 2022 book, The Entangled Brain, we began examining subcortical regions and their potential role in the production and regulation of emotions, such as fear and anger. In this post, we round out the chapter by taking a brief look at subcortical involvement in motivation.

The origins of motivation research

What does it mean to study motivation? According to Pessoa, research on motivation involves understanding how animals go about seeking rewards. Here, the first wave of motivation research in neuroscience was sparked by Olds and Milner (1954), who placed electrodes in different brain areas of rats, before placing the rats in a box (see Fig. 1). If the rats happened to hit a lever, this would send an electrical stimulation to their brains, to which the rats would start exploring the box excitedly if they found the stimulation desirable. After pressing the lever (by accident) a couple of times, the rats would cease their search and simply start hitting the lever incessantly.

Fig. 1 Electrical self-stimulation by rats (Pessoa, 2022)

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 5.2, Memory for Melody

In the first part of Chapter 5, we focused predominantly on the elements that make up melody and how Gestalt principles might be used to perceive these elements as a coherent whole. Continuing the discussion on the perception of melody and musical pitch, Tan et al. (2010) round out this chapter by focusing on memory for melody and potential neural bases for pitch and melody perception.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 5.1, Gestalt Principles in Melody Perception

Chapter 5 marks the start of a new section of the book. While we've been covering foundational concepts that will serve us well in future parts of the book, this chapter begins our exploration of perception and cognition in music. Specifically, Tan et al. (2010) discuss the perception of melody and, more specifically, musical pitch. In this chapter, the authors begin with an introduction to the various elements of melodies, followed by a Gestalt perspective on melody perception. In a separate post, we'll also discuss memory-related findings on pitch and melody, as well as what neuroscience can tell us about melody perception.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 4, Neuroscience and Music

Chapter 4 of the book takes a slight detour from sound and music per se and instead provides us with a general introduction to neuroscience. Given the importance of neuroscientific methodologies and approaches that will be utilised in later chapters, it makes sense for the authors to include this before moving on to more specific topics in music. Given that I am already writing another blog series on a neuroscience-focused book, I will cover these aspects of the chapter briefly and, as far as possible, try to link them back to the study of music psychology.

In this post, we'll begin by touching on some general issues facing the neuroscience of music as a discipline, explore the important neural structures and functions related to music, and introduce some common methods for studying the brain. Finally, we'll end off by discussing the link (or lack thereof) between music and language abilities.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 3.2, The Anatomy of Audition

In this post, we'll cover the latter half of Chapter 3 on the (neuro)anatomy and physiology of the auditory system. Specifically, we'll discuss the 3 main components of the auditory system: the external ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The section on the inner ear will focus on the cochlea and how it may help us identify pitch. Finally, the last part of the chapter briefly talks about the auditory cortex.

Fig. 1 The anatomy of the ear (Plack, 2018)

Building a BSc Thesis 2: Representative Learning Design

In a previous post, we talked about the importance of Brunswik's (1956) representative (experimental) design and how it aims to create experimental tasks that sufficiently represent real-world behavioural settings to which results are intended to be generalised. Consequently, it motivated me to design a fully in situ task (i.e., a task performed in participants' natural behavioural or performance settings) for my participants. Now that I have my population group (i.e., volleyball players), main apparatus (i.e., eye-tracking glasses), and in situ task (i.e., a volleyball spiking task on a volleyball court), what independent variables will I manipulate? This is what we'll explore in this post!

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 5.1, Subcortical Involvement in Emotion

After 4 chapters, we're finally taking a deeper dive into specific functions of the brain. Firstly, we're going to look at areas conventionally thought to be heavily involved in emotional regulation, including the hypothalamus and the amygdala. In a separate post, we'll cover the final part of the chapter that touches on motivation. Of course, cortical regions feature too, but these will be the topic of the following chapter.

As we go along, just keep in mind Pessoa's thesis of the highly distributed and networked brain. Independent functions do not singly map onto spatially isolated parts of the brain. Instead, a many-to-many function-to-structure mapping is involved. As you'll see, while we'll start with emotion and motivation, the subcortical areas discussed are heavily implicated in many more diverse functions.