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This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

(CLIP: Tuning¹ sound)

Remember scrolling² through the radio dial, hoping a tune³ you liked would pop out of the static? You never had to listen too long to know you'd landed on a hit.

"Music has a really strong, remarkably⁴ strong, hold on us. So it's way enough to be exposed to a very brief snippet of a familiar song for us to be able to recognize it."

Maria Chait, an auditory cognitive⁵ neuroscientist at University College London.

Chait and her team recently studied how quick that reflex is. They started by asking 10 volunteers to name a feel-good, familiar song—like this:

(CLIP: Song 1)

Then the researchers handpicked a second tune that sounded similar but was unfamiliar⁶ to the volunteer.

(CLIP: Song 2)

They chopped both songs into tiny bits—each less than a second long—and then randomly⁷ interspersed⁸ them into a six-and-a-half-minute-long track of song snippets.

(CLIP: Snippet track)

As the snippets played, the scientists measured the volunteers' brain activity via a network of 128 electrodes and monitored changes in pupil diameter, too—a sign of arousal. And the researchers found that the listeners' pupils dilated⁹ more rapidly when they heard familiar versus¹⁰ unfamiliar samples—within just a tenth to a third of a second!

Familiar tunes¹¹ also triggered a two-step pattern of brain activation¹² almost identical to that seen in other memory studies—where the brain first recognizes something as familiar and then retrieves¹³ more detailed¹⁴ information about it. That pattern was absent for unfamiliar songs and for the control group.

The results are in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study does have limitations: it used a small number of songs; it was hard to mask the purpose of the study from the participants; and the control group ended up being primarily international students from Asia—since they had to be unfamiliar with every single song—so their native languages and music backgrounds differed from the experimental group—which was primarily students from a European background.

Still, for clinicians who want to use music as a therapeutic¹⁵ tool for patients with dementia, for example, this study might provide a few clues:

"There's a lot of interest in trying to develop so to speak objective measures of music enjoyment¹⁶, of music familiarity. And this paradigm¹⁷ might be useful in this context, because it doesn't require the participant to indicate anything. They just listen passively."

Clinicians simply have to observe the neural¹⁸ fingerprints¹⁹ of hearing that same old song.

Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。

（音频剪辑：音调）

还记得在收音机上调台，希望你喜欢的曲子突然出现的时候吗？你不需要太长时间就能听到你想要的歌。

“音乐对我们的影响非常大，极为强大。只要听一小段熟悉的歌曲，我们就能识别出来。”

伦敦大学学院的听觉认知神经学家玛丽亚·柴特说到。

柴特及其团队最近研究了这种反应的迅速程度。他们先让10名志愿者说出一首他们喜欢且 熟悉的歌曲，比如这首：

（音频剪辑：歌曲1）

然后，研究人员精心挑选了第二首听起来相似但志愿者不熟悉的歌曲。

（音频剪辑：歌曲2）

他们将两首歌都切成微小段落，每段时长都少于1秒，然后随机将其插入一首六分半的歌曲中。

（音频剪辑：歌曲片段）

歌曲片段播放时，科学家用128个电极组成的网络来测量志愿者的大脑活动，并监测他们瞳孔直径的变化——这是兴奋的信号。研究人员发现，相比不熟悉的样本，听者听到熟悉样本时瞳孔扩大的速度更快——仅需十分之一到三分之一秒！

熟悉的曲调也触发了大脑的两步激活模式，这与在其他记忆研究中看到的几乎相同——大脑首先识别熟悉的事物，然后检索有关它的更详细信息。这种模式在不熟悉的歌曲和对照组中并不存在。

研究结果发表在《科学报告》期刊上。

这项研究确实有一些局限性：它只使用了少量歌曲；很难向参与者隐瞒研究的目的；而且对照组最终选择了来自亚洲的国际学生，因为他们对每首歌都不熟悉，所以他们的母语和音乐背景与由欧洲学生组成的实验组不同。

不过，对于那些想将音乐作为痴呆患者治疗工具的临床医生来说，这项研究可能会提供一些线索：

“人们对建立音乐享受和和熟悉度的客观衡量标准很感兴趣。这个范例在这种情况下可能是有用的，因为它不需要参与者指出任何东西。他们只是被动地倾听。”

临床医生只需要观察听到这首老歌的神经图谱。

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。