![]() The historic oral hygiene level in US is closely associated with the emerging allergic epidemic. Recent studies on immigrants' allergies and any potential association between oral infection and allergic diseases prompt me to propose a specific hygiene hypothesis to explain how oral hygiene practices might have contributed to the uprising of hay fever, the most common allergic disease. However, translational measures deduced from these studies to prevent allergic diseases have not proven effective. The hygiene hypothesis proposed more than twenty years ago has helped us to understand the epidemic and has been verified with numerous studies. The OPERA hypothesis is used to account for the observed superior subcortical encoding of speech in musically trained individuals, and to suggest mechanisms by which musical training might improve linguistic reading abilities.Īllergic diseases have reached epidemic proportions in Western populations in the last several decades. Yet since speech shares these networks with music, speech processing benefits. According to the OPERA hypothesis, when these conditions are met neural plasticity drives the networks in question to function with higher precision than needed for ordinary speech communication. These are: (1) Overlap: there is anatomical overlap in the brain networks that process an acoustic feature used in both music and speech (e.g., waveform periodicity, amplitude envelope), (2) Precision: music places higher demands on these shared networks than does speech, in terms of the precision of processing, (3) Emotion: the musical activities that engage this network elicit strong positive emotion, (4) Repetition: the musical activities that engage this network are frequently repeated, and (5) Attention: the musical activities that engage this network are associated with focused attention. The "OPERA" hypothesis proposes that such benefits are driven by adaptive plasticity in speech-processing networks, and that this plasticity occurs when five conditions are met. This paper offers a hypothesis specifying why such benefits occur. Mounting evidence suggests that musical training benefits the neural encoding of speech. Why would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |