| Sumario: | Part of a special section on some of the reports from the 1997 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The writer discusses research conducted by Robert Zatorre, of McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, and Diana Deutsch, of the University of California, San Diego, into the relationship between the ways that music and language are represented in the human brain. Using positron-emission tomography scans, Zatorre found that bright spots of activity appeared more or less opposite the language-processing areas of subjects' brains when they listened to music. He observed activity near the back of their brains as well, which is the area associated with processing visual data. Deutsch's research, however, hints that the story of what gets processed where is more complicated. She works with musical illusions, one of which suggests that the language-processing areas themselves have a great deal to do with processing music.
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