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Far from being the Province of the Eggheads, neuroscience has turned into a wild frontier of discovery - and music plays a surprisingly large role in the neuroscientific discussion. Prior to around 1980, the field was still in its infancy. Monty Python, as far back as their Matching Tie And Handkerchief album in the mid 70s, explained that "the human brain is like an enormous fish: it's fat and slimy, and has gills through which it can see." Recent advances in neuroscience show that at least parts of that statement are inaccurate, and as our knowledge of the brain increases, so do the questions about music, and how it might come to have its undeniable, demonstrable, but still inexplicable effect on our minds.

A number of neuroscientists have studied how the human brain can decode the "message" in music. We all know what the sliding, dissonant strings mean when the bad guy is stalking the innocent babysitter in the darkened house; we understand the significance of the brass fanfares that peal out joyfully when Rocky, the boxer, finally makes it up that long, long run of stairs. We know these things because there are visual cues that go with them - but we'd get the overall message of menace or triumph even if we weren't watching the films, because we have cultural "markers" of a sort encoded into the music.

The question is, how much of this are we born with and how much do we learn? I grew up in NY and have never set foot on the Solomon Islands, so I wouldn't expect to be able to tell whether a piece of music from those islands is expressing happiness, sadness, fear, etc. because I don't know their cultural markers. And yet, the first time I listened to an album of field recordings made on those islands, without understanding a single word, I could immediately sense a message of contentedness and peacefulness in one of the songs. Sure enough, it was titled "Lullaby."

This by the way was no great feat on my part. A year or two later, a pair of French producers also heard that track, sampled it, and turned it into one of the first World Music hits: Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. The lead vocal is simply this old track from a Solomon Islands recording (uncredited, of course) set to a modern-back-in-1992 dance beat. So without us understanding a word, this simple song from a culture almost literally a world away from our own was able to suggest a mood or an emotion. How that happens is one of the fascinating questions neuroscience is currently grappling with.

Tell us: have you found music from other cultures incomprehensible, or have there been pieces that you "understood" on some level?