Investigating music, memory and cognition

Associate Professor Leonardo Bonetti is a Carlsberg Foundation Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, and Associate Professor at the Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University.

Holding two master’s degrees in classical guitar and in psychology, and a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, his research focuses on exploring the brain mechanisms underlying memory for music and temporal sequences.

Associate Professor Bonetti has received numerous research grants and awards, including the Marco Capogna Young Neuroscientist Prize and the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize.

Associate Professor Bonetti’s research has found that when we memorise and recognise music, we rely on a complex brain network built on sequentially active brain regions, which communicate to each other in milliseconds.

Notably, when researching both younger and older adults, no differences were observed in the performance of musical memory tasks.

However, older adults displayed signs of altered brain functioning, hinting at the potential for age-related changes in cognitive processes.

These findings are extremely important, as they open up the possibility of developing screening tools that can quantify an individual's risk of developing dementia.

By combining musical memory paradigms with cutting-edge methods, researchers can use short musical excerpts to gain insights into how the brain processes information hierarchically over time.

Music's hierarchical organisation of sounds makes it an invaluable tool for understanding temporal cognition.

In his multidisciplinary career, Associate Professor Bonetti has not only used music to understand the brain, but also drawn concepts from music psychology to compose a series of musical pieces for classical guitar.

Associate Professor Bonetti believes that one of the biggest opportunities that we have in cognitive neuroscience at the moment is trying to develop screening tools.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and advanced neuroimaging techniques like magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers can harness the wealth of data at their disposal to analyse healthy individuals.

By identifying early markers and potential indicators of diseases, such as dementia, cognitive neuroscience has the potential to transform early detection and intervention strategies.

Oxford is an exciting place because it brings together international researchers and fosters inclusivity and cooperation between different academic fields and institutions.

The field of neuroscience thrives on multidisciplinary collaboration, drawing together psychologists, medical doctors, biologists, computer scientists, engineers, and physicists.

Looking ahead, Associate Professor Bonetti hopes communication between disciplines is further strengthened, creating an environment where neuroscience research flourishes.

He emphasises the need for research outputs in neuroscience and in science in general to be available to anybody, ensuring this knowledge reaches not only academia but also the general public.

Associate Professor Bonetti advocates for new researchers in the field to come from a range of backgrounds. By fostering interdisciplinary education, students can learn a diverse set of skills that will equip them to tackle the complex challenges of neuroscience.