Listening to familiar music has recently been reported to be beneficial during recovery from stroke. A better understanding of changes in functional connectivity and information flow is warranted in order to further optimize and target this approach through music therapy. Twelve healthy volunteers listened to seven different auditory samples during an fMRI scanning session: a musical piece chosen by the volunteer that evokes a strong emotional response (referred to as: "self-selected emotional"), two unfamiliar music pieces (Invention #1 by J. S. Bach* and Gagaku - Japanese classical opera, referred to as "unfamiliar"), the Bach piece repeated with visual guidance (DML: Directed Music Listening) and three spoken language pieces (unfamiliar African click language, an excerpt of emotionally charged language, and an unemotional reading of a news bulletin). Functional connectivity and betweenness (BTW) maps, a measure for information flow, were created with a graph-theoretical approach. Distinct variation in functional connectivity was found for different music pieces consistently for all subjects. Largest brain areas were recruited for processing self-selected music with emotional attachment or culturally unfamiliar music. Maps of information flow correlated significantly with fMRI BOLD activation maps (p<0.05). Observed differences in BOLD activation and functional connectivity may help explain previously observed beneficial effects in stroke recovery, as increased blood flow to damaged brain areas stimulated by active engagement through music listening may have supported a state more conducive to therapy.

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Implicit in Heidegger's 1920-1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a radical transformation of the very structures of experience. This article seeks to apply that account to a classical Indian discourse on reality and the self, Chāndogya Upanis . ad chapter six. This classical source-text for two thousand years of Hindu theology advocates a new 'religious life' achieved through phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of cognition toward the broadest truths of reality, rather than the finite features of the world. The goal is to create a new form of primordial subjectivity with an altered relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. The article proceeds in two parts: The first section brings out Heidegger's theory of religion through a reading of Heidegger's 1920 Phenomenology of Religious Life with the help of his lectures, On the Definition of Philosophy, from the previous year. The second section tries to demonstrate the value of integrating traditional textual/historical scholarship in the Chāndogya Upanis . ad with Heidegger's method. The juxtaposition aims to both (1) foreground the phenomenologically transformative goals of this influential Indian text, and (2) challenge Heidegger's scepticism about the religious value of metaphysical reflection.This article looks at what it means to enter a new 'religious life' by phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of experience toward the broadest truths of reality-that is, by shifting one's perspective so fundamentally that the world is experienced in terms of its universal features, rather than its finite, transient details. Heidegger's 1919-1921 lectures on 'The Phenomenology of Religious Life' described his vision of what the Christian experience can and should be. But they also contained a broader theory of religion, taking it to be a cultural form that alters the most basic patterns of our experience of the world in such a way that it reorients our sense of identity, values, and behaviour. Complimenting this, they also demonstrated a ground-breaking method of reading that seeks 'to penetrate therewith into the grounding phenomena of primordial [religious] life.' Here, we apply this to a classical Hindu text that aimed to create a new form of experience which alters one's relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. 1 In the Chāndogya Upanis . ad, a 6th century text that shaped Hindu understandings of divinity for two millennia, a father asks his 'swollen-headed' son whether his teachers have passed on a special kind of truth that does not just fill the mind, but also transforms it: 1 The Upanis . ads are generally taken as introducing proto-philosophical ideas about metaphysics, identity, causality, and selfhood, that would later be refined in India's scholastic traditions. Texts, like the Chāndogya Upanis . ad, a c.7th century reflection on language and meaning, universalisation and essence, and finitude and immortality, highlights the uses of philosophical thinking as a spiritual exercise...

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Benefits of listening to music with emotional attachment while recovering from a cerebral ischemic event have been reported. To develop a better understanding of the effects of music listening on the human brain, an algorithm for the graph-theoretical analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data was developed. From BOLD data of two paradigms (block-design, first piece: music without emotional attachment, additional visual guidance by a moving cursor in the score sheet; second piece: music with emotional attachment), network graphs were constructed with correlations between signal time courses as edge weights. Functional subunits in these graphs were identified with the MCODE clustering algorithm and mapped back into anatomical space using AFNI. Emotional centers including the right amygdala and bilateral insula were activated by the second piece (emotional attachment) but not by the first piece. Network clustering analysis revealed two separate networks of small-world property corresponding to task-oriented and resting state conditions, respectively. Functional subunits with highest interactions were bilateral precuneus for the first piece and left middle frontal gyrus and right amygdala, bilateral insula, left middle temporal gyrus for the second piece. Our results indicate that fMRI in connection with graph theoretical network analysis is capable of identifying and differentiating functional subunits in the human brain when listening to music with and without emotional attachment.