“Music and the Mind,” a series of six lectures over the next five months at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, will explore the minds of musicians — how their brains differ, how they learn music, why they create music, how and if music engages the mind and what happens when musicians have strokes or other brain diseases.

The series begins Friday with a talk titled “Transformation in Music: Its Neuroscientific Effect,” presented by Anthony Brandt, assistant professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, and David Rosenfield, M.D. Rosenfield is professor of neurology and director of the Speech and Language Center, Department of Neurology, at Baylor College of Medicine/The Methodist Hospital. He is also a professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Communicative Sciences at Baylor, holds a joint appointment as professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Houston and, most recently, holds a lecturer appointment at the Shepherd School.

Dr. David Rosenfield

In this introductory lecture, Rosenfield will give a synopsis of the current state of the research, and Brandt will address the central issues of musical perception that could be a focus of future research.

One of the topics for discussion is how the brains of musicians differ from the brains of nonmusicians.

“Musicians can learn new visual memories and new motor programming memories throughout adulthood,” Rosenfield said. “If you want to learn a new language as an adult, it’s hard. Yet a musician looks at a visual symbol and translates that into a motor output that in turn provides an auditory input. People who do that professionally have different brains.”

Brandt notes that while scientific study of the mind is relatively recent, it’s familiar territory for artists. “The human mind is one of the frontiers of 21st-century science,” he said, “and a partnership between artists and scientists is the most productive way to explore the mind. Scientists have more regimented and documented methods for such exploration, but artists have for thousands of years been concerned with how we as humans think, how we feel and who we are.”

Brandt and Rosenfield both see the universality of music — “a language that transcends cultures,” Brandt calls it — as an indicator of how the brain functions.

“Just as human brains are programmed for language, there is an increasing wealth of data showing that human brains are also programmed for music,” Rosenfield said. “All cultures throughout time have had music, and the question is, Is this something that brains mandate? Just as brains mandate language, do they mandate music? Why is it that music exists?”

The idea for the “Music and the Mind” lecture series began last year when Robert Yekovich, dean of the Shepherd School and the Elma Schneider Professor of Music, was invited to the Texas Medical Center to meet with doctors who had an interest in the arts. One of the doctors was Rosenfield.

“David and I began to talk and explore our mutual interest in music’s effect on the brain,” Yekovich said. “As a result of these talks, he gave a lecture on the topic last year at Rice, as well as a joint lecture with Tony Brandt at the Texas Medical Center.”

At about the same time, Yekovich attended a symposium in Aspen, Colo., on health care and the arts, where the keynote address was about research on music’s impact on the chemical activity of the brain.

“There is a great deal of speculation about what it could mean to stimulate those centers of the brain,” he said. “We are just now becoming able to scientifically investigate it. Because of brain imaging, a whole new world is opening up.”

Yekovich will introduce the series, which will feature guest lecturers on the following topics: The Uniqueness of Musicians’ Brains: A Neuroscience Perspective and Update (Jan. 21), Brain Disease and Musicians (Feb. 18), How the Brain Processes Stylistic Differences in Music (March 4), Music’s Ability to Engage the Mind, or Not (March 25) and Why does the Brain Create Music? (April 8).

All lectures will take place at noon in Room 1133 of Alice Pratt Brown Hall. The series is supported by the Deschko Family Memorial, which has sponsored other lectures on this topic in memory of Michael Hammond, dean of the Shepherd School for nearly 16 years, who was one of the pioneers of research on music and the brain.

“I’m delighted to continue and expand upon the investigation initiated by former Dean Michael Hammond and in so doing to capitalize on the unique resource provided the Shepherd School by the Texas Medical Center,” Yekovich said.