05-Juslin & Sloboda-Ch-05.indd

The functioning of the brain is fascinating. It fascinates for the obvious reason that the brain is the commander of all our actions, thoughts, and motivations. By studying its functioning, we hope to obtain crucial information about the biological basis of human cognition and emotion. Neuropsychology is the discipline concerned with these questions. As its name indicates, neuropsychology aims to relate neural mechanisms to mental functions. It is an old discipline, dating back to the discovery by Broca in (1861) that speech was related to the functioning of a small region of the left brain. Following this discovery, the neural correlates of musical abilities were similarly scrutinized (e.g. Bouillaud, 1865). Although the neuropsychological approach to music is a century old, progress has been slow until recently. Recent advances in brain-imaging techniques (see Chapter 12, this volume), as well as the current trend of viewing most human activities from a biological perspective, has intensifi ed research activities in the fi eld. As a result of this biological trend, neuropsychology has been recently renamed ‘cognitive neuroscience’. This change in terminology refl ects the intention to include neuropsychology within the vast domain of neuroscience. Because neuroscience covers a large spectrum of discipline—from the physiological study of single neurons in the turtle retina (Sernagor & Grzywacz, 1996) to the brain organization subserving the sense of humour in humans (Shammi & Stuss, 1999)—‘cognitive’ has qualifi ed the ‘neuroscience’ term. The qualifi er is unfortunate because ‘cognitive’ usually excludes emotion. Indeed, cognition is often seen as antithetical to emotion. For example, Kivy (1990) in his infl uential essay on the meaning of music coined the term ‘cognitivist’ to refer to the position that holds that music simply expresses emotions without inducing them. The opposite position, called ‘emotivist’, holds that music induces emotions in listeners.