Leonardo Bonetti
He uses music to understand cognitive processes
Leonardo Bonetti, postdoc, is receiving a 2022 Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize for his cognitive research – which also allows him to draw on his background as a music academy-trained musician.
To become a music academy-trained musician you need to be extremely musical and have the perseverance to practise long and hard.
This was also the case for Leonardo Bonetti, postdoc at the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University and one of the five researchers to receive the 2022 Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize.
His musicality and work ethic were undisputed, and the music conservatory in Bologna, Italy, accepted his application – so Bonetti began training as a classical guitarist. After completing his training, he went on to attain a Master’s degree in psychology from the University of Bologna – ‘strongly inspired by music,’ he explains.
‘The decision to study psychology evolved as I was training to become a guitarist. I only really started understanding how good a tool music is when I wanted to study cognitive processes. Music is characterised by a hierarchical structure, and when you listen to music, it triggers a process in which a series of the key elements that characterise human brain activity are active. It’s about attention, emotions and, not least, memory – and I realised that I wanted to use music to study these processes,’ continues Bonetti.
A logical place to conduct these types of studies was the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University, which is headed by Peter Vuust. This has been Bonetti’s main research base for the past five years.
Bonetti has also conducted research as a Carlsberg Foundation Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at University of Oxford in the UK. This is an interdisciplinary centre headed by Danish professor of neuroscience Morten Kringelbach, where psychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, artists and philosophers work together to study the human brain’s dynamic processes and dynamic capacity – in close collaboration with the Center for Music in the Brain, with which Morten Kringelbach is also affiliated.
One of the studies Bonetti has completed involved 300 subjects – all of whom were asked, one by one, to listen to a musical “cocktail”. And while the subjects listened to the music, comprised primarily of themes from Johan Sebastian Bach compositions, their brain activity was measured using advanced neuroimaging techniques.
‘The participants were asked to try to remember the music we played for them. During a later scan, we studied what happened when we played the music for them again – that is, whether they recognised it. Finally, we conducted scans where the 300 subjects were presented with music that we hadn’t played for them before,’ explains Bonetti.
The brain scans – which were conducted using two different techniques – showed what happened in the brain in this context, according to Bonetti:
‘We could see how different areas in the brain work together – when it comes to remembering and recognising music. And we could see that the brain works so fast that it takes all in all less than half a second to remember and later recognise a sound or tone.’
The 300 subjects spanned a relatively wide range of ages, and the brain activity levels measured during the music experiment were generally highest amongst the younger subjects. This is not to say, according to Bonetti, that the cohort of elderly subjects were bad at storing and later recognising the music. How this is to be understood in more detail is not yet clear.
The study explored the fundamental conditions that control cognition – especially memory – and Bonetti will now conduct similar experiments with subjects who have been diagnosed with various types of dementia.
‘In this context, it would also be relevant to use music to expand our understanding of what dementia does to the brain’s cognitive capacity,’ he concludes.
Leonardo Bonetti about his research and the Talent Prize:
