唱歌找不着调的人注意了！最近有一项研究结果显示，对音乐曲调毫无感觉的“音盲”人士对音乐曲调没有感觉是因为他们的某些脑神经元传输不畅。一般来说，患“音盲”的人无法辨别音乐曲调的差异，而且有很强的遗传性。在这项研究中，研究人员通过对“音盲”和非“音盲”两组被试者的大脑扫描发现，患“音盲”的被试者大脑中接收和制造声音的两个区域连接以及其中的神经元传输都比非“音盲”的被试者要少，有时甚至扫描不到有神经元在传输。如果把这两个区域比作两个小岛，而把它们之间的神经元传输通道比作公路的话，那么，患“音盲”的人大脑中这条“公路”上的车流要显得稀疏很多。研究人员表示，这一发现可能会对治疗其他类型的语言障碍有所帮助。

If you're one of the unlucky people who is tone-deaf, it turns out your brain may have a wiring problem. That's what new research published Wednesday suggests.

Do your friends cover their ears when you sing along with the radio? Does the choir¹ director ask you to lip-sync?

If you're one of the unlucky people who is tone-deaf, it turns out your brain may have a wiring problem. That's what new research published Wednesday suggests.

People who are tone-deaf can't detect differences in musical pitch but usually have normal hearing and speech. Tone-deafness runs in families, and estimates of how many people have the problem range from 4 percent to 17 percent.

In the small study done in Boston, brain scans showed there was a difference in a particular brain circuit between those who were tone-deaf and those who weren't. Among the tone-deaf, researchers discovered there were fewer connections between two areas of the brain that perceive and produce sounds.

The study's lead author, Psyche² Loui, likened the connection to a highway between two islands in the brain.

In tone-deaf people, "there's less traffic on the highway," said Loui, who studies music and the brain at Harvard Medical School and is also a musician.

Loui and her colleagues took brain scans of 20 people, half of them tone-deaf. Those who were tone-deaf had fewer nerve fibers³ between the frontal and temporal regions of the brain, or in some cases the fibers couldn't be detected at all.

The researchers reported their findings in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

"It's a new piece in our understanding of tone-deafness and the processes that are involved in the perception of pitch in general," said Nina Kraus of Northwestern University, who wasn't involved in the research.

Loui said the brain connection they examined was long known to be involved in language. "Now that we know which brain pathways to train," she said, there may be ways to help people with tone-deafness, and perhaps those with other language disorders⁴.

Vocabulary:

lip-sync: 对口型，假唱

tone-deaf: 音盲，无法分辨音律