Music Affects Emotion, Involves Deep Levels Of Your Brain, And Helps You To Heal
Although music involves many areas of the brain, people listen to or play music because they like it. Research also indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes.
In addition to a cognitive appraisal, Dr. Patrik Juslin and his team at Uppsala University, Sweden suggest, in a study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, that underlying mechanisms that could explain why listening to music may induce emotions, involving reflexes, conditioning, emotional contagion, visual imagery, memory, and expectancy.
At deeper level, music stimulates activities of the amygdala, which regulates emotion, and even the brain stem, which is the center for many of the vital functions of our bodies such as breathing, heart rate, and digestion.
Due to its unique nature, music can be an effective way to change and treat our brains. Many interesting stories have been recorded in various fields. A woman with Parkinson’s disease, for example, who was not able to balance and had difficulty in walking, could move her legs with ease while music was playing, and showed improved balance and found it hard to stop dancing.
Music therapy has demonstrated effectiveness as a way to treat neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, brain injury, anxiety, and depression.
Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare in Florida has utilized the benefits of music for a variety of patients. Live music therapy using patient-preferred music has been beneficial in improving quality-of-life indicators such as anxiety, perception of the hospitalization or procedure, relaxation, and stress in patients undergoing surgical procedures of the brain.
Playing music, such as rhythmic drumming, is now used as a holistic health technique. A study published in PLOS One demonstrates that drumming can induce synchronous brain activities in various areas of brain and can be beneficial for attention deficit disorder, alleviating anxiety, and stress relief. It also creates a sense of bonding and connectedness from person to person in a community. This might explain why music has been widely used in ceremonial rites in most societies throughout history.
Our Body Can Be A Natural Instrument
For some people, it may not be easy to express themselves using music. Even though we all have some innate affection for music, sometimes people, myself included, get nervous when they have to perform music. But I found a very interesting observation in Ilchi Lee’s “Brain Wave Vibration”: our body can be our best natural instrument.
If you lie down and stay for a while in a very quiet place, you may begin to hear the pumping sound of your own heart. As the heart beats, the body is continuously generating rhythm in our lives. From the beginning, the fetus can listen to the mother’s heartbeat, and sounds of its parents. The reaction of babies to lullabies suggests that musical ability is an innate function of human beings.
Starting with tapping a foot to the music, we can develop a rhythm with our body. Practicing in the place where you won’t be interrupted and using your body as a drum can be one way to develop musical function and communicate with your brain.
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
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- Easy Listening — The Neuroscience of Music: An Interview with Dr. Daniel Levitin
- Growing Your Emotional Intelligence and Changing Your “Longitude”
- Healing Music: An Interview with Stanley Jordan
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- The Wonder of Math: A Conversation with Danica McKellar
