Musicians—from karaoke singers to professional violin players—are better able to hear targeted sounds in a noisy environment, ac

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问题     Musicians—from karaoke singers to professional violin players—are better able to hear targeted sounds in a noisy environment, according to new research that adds to evidence that music makes the brain work better.
    "In the past ten years there’s been an explosion of research on music and the brain," Aniruddh Patel, the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said today at a press briefing.
    Most recently brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language.
    Language is a natural aspect to consider in looking at how music affects the brain, Patel said. Like music, language is "universal, there’s a strong learning component, and it carries complex meanings. "
    For example, brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois.
    Kraus’ previous research had shown that when a person listens to a sound, the brain wave recorded in response is physically the same as the sound wave itself. In fact "playing" the brain wave produces a nearly identical sound.
    But for people without a trained ear for music, the ability to make these patterns decreases as background noise increases, experiments show. Musicians, by contrast, have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up.
    At the same time, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia(阅读障碍症), have a harder time hearing sounds amid the noise—a serious problem, for example, for students straining to hear the teacher in a noisy classroom.
    Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders, Kraus said.
    In a similar vein, Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first.
    In his research, Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions(损伤)on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language.
    Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty.
    "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said.
    Overall, Schlaug said, the experiments show that "music might be an alternative medium for engaging parts of the brain that are otherwise not engaged. "
Why can musicians hear selective sound patterns in a noisy environment?

选项 A、Because they have subconsciously trained their ears to get accustomed to those sound patterns.
B、Because their brains have been trained to recognize specific sound patterns in noisy background.
C、Because they can produce the brain wave patterns the same as those sound patterns.
D、Because their trained ears are sensitive to specific sound patterns no matter where they are.

答案C

解析 推理判断题。由第六段第一句可知,科学家研究表明,人在听声音时,由此产生的脑波与声波具有物理相似性。此外,根据第七段第一句可知,对没有经过专门音乐训练的人来说,制造这些波形模式的能力会随背景噪音的增强而下降。由此可推断,音乐家因经过专门的音乐训练,他们在嘈杂背景中具有能听到特定声音模式的能力,因此C)为答案。A)“因为他们潜意识地训练耳朵熟悉这些声音模式”.B)“因为他们的大脑已经受过在嘈杂的背景中识别声音模式的训练”,D)“因为他们经过训练的耳朵对特定的声音模式非常敏感,无论它们在哪里出现”,均是对原文的曲解,故排除。
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