Associate professor receives grant for research into the brain’s musical memory
Leonardo Bonetti is an associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine and the Center for Music in the Brain. He researches the brain’s ability to recognize musical patterns and is among 36 selected researchers receiving a Sapere Aude Research Leader grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
A new grant of DKK 6,191,680 enables Leonardo Bonetti to establish his own research group and pursue his research project The Well-Tempered Brain, which investigates how the brain listens to, remembers, and predicts sounds - specifically musical patterns over time by combining advanced neurophysiological and analytical techniques.
"Imagine hearing a melody and instantly recognizing it, even if you haven’t heard it in years. How does the brain make that possible? That’s exactly what my project aims to help us understand," says Leonardo Bonetti.
The project combines advanced methods such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) to map how the brain stores and recalls musical sequences. The goal is both to identify the brain regions involved in these processes and to understand how they interact and store information over time.
Leonardo Bonetti hopes the results may have implications for better understanding patients with memory problems - for example, individuals with Alzheimer’s disease - and to further advance our knowledge on different spatio-temporal scales of the brain.
Contact
Associate Professor Leonardo Bonetti
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine – Center for Music in the Brain
Email: leonardo.bonetti@clin.au.dk