Saturday, March 12, 2005

Scientists may have found what makes a tune catchy, after locating the brain area where a song's "hook" gets caught.

A US team from Dartmouth College, reported in the journal Nature, played volunteers tunes with snippets cut out.

They scanned for brain activity and found it centred in the auditory cortex - which handles information from ears.

When familiar tunes played, the cortex activity continued during the blanks - and the volunteers indeed said they still mentally "heard" the tunes.

David Kraemer, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences Department who led the study, said: "We found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped."