MONDAY, JULY 20
FROM MELODIES TO MEMORIES
Petr Janata, PhD
Professor of Psychology, Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis
Presentation Synopsis
In his presentation “From Melodies to Memories,” Petr Janata, PhD, explores the psychological and neural mechanisms that tie together our perception of music with the formation of our memories, both for the music itself and for the information and events that accompany the music. Seeking to understand how the brain supports the salient and widely experienced but seemingly unrelated psycho-musical phenomena of “music-evoked remembering” and “music that gets stuck in our heads,” Janata’s research finds that basic principles of the brain’s anatomical and functional organization, which more generally enable us to interact successfully with our environments over our lifetimes, naturally allow music to shape and support our lived experience. In turn, music—conceived of as an artful crafting of structured event sequences that play with our expectations and emotions—provides an excellent vehicle for probing and illustrating the capacities of the human brain.
About Petr Janata
Petr Janata is a professor in the Psychology Department and Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. He received his BA from Reed College and his PhD from the University of Oregon. After investigating song perception and song learning in songbirds as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, he went to Dartmouth College and incorporated functional neuroimaging methods into his music-perception research. His research on how the human brain engages with music has examined expectation, imagery, sensorimotor coupling, memory, and emotion in relation to tonality, rhythm, and timbre. Janata’s work also emphasizes the use of models of musical structure to analyze behavioral and brain data. He’s pioneered psychological and brain research examining musical situations that elicit strong emotional experiences, such as music-evoked remembering or the state of “being in the groove.” Janata’s research on the latter topic extends, literally, to the skiing of moguls (mounds of snow), which he utilizes as a real-world model system for understanding the neural dynamics of planning and executing fluent whole-body movements under time pressure.
Janata is the recipient of two Fulbright Research Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Templeton Advanced Research Program Award from the Metanexus Institute, and grant funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Grammy Foundation.
For more information on this topic and about Petr Janata’s work, visit atonal.ucdavis.edu.