Musicians don't just hear in tune, they also see in tune, according to a new research.
Vanderbilt University researchers designed a scientific experiment to puzzle out how the brain creates an apparently seamless view of the external world based on the information it receives from the eyes.
Researcher Randolph Blake said that the brain is remarkably efficient at putting people in touch with objects and events in visual environment, indeed so good that the process seems automatic and effortless.
Blake added that the brain is continually operating like a clever detective, using clues to figure out what in the world we are looking at. And those clues come not only from what we see but also from other sources.
The team discovered that information as abstract as musical notation can affect what we see.
Blake noted that what this tells is that the kind of information the brain uses to interpret what people see around them includes abstract symbolic input such as music notation, but this kind of input is only effective while an individual is aware of it.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.
