Depending on the music itself, different areas of your brain will light up. But what’s most interesting is that different kinds of music and the different settings in which you hear the music will cause different parts of your brain to become active. So brain activity will differ if you’re listening to live music versus recorded music, or if you’re listening to music with lyrics as opposed to without.
Because music is intrinsically linked to several different parts of our lives, it can cause our brains to react in any number of ways. If you’re listening to music with lyrics, then parts of the brain that process language will come into play. If it’s a song that reminds you of a particular time or event, the medial prefrontal cortex, wherein memories are stored, is activated. You might start envisioning the scenario of the song, a visual image that would cause the visual cortex to light up. Your brain might be trying to figure out what the next note will be or fill in the words to the song. It might lead you to tap your feet. All of these reactions are triggered by different parts of the brain and will be activated depending on the song, your relationship to it, and how you’re listening to it.
And we already know that music releases dopamine and activates the reward centers of the brain, giving us the same happiness we would get from chocolate, sex, or drugs.
If you want to improve your mood, play some music. You’re hardwired to react emotionally to it, so you might as well take advantage of this. Even babies as young as 5 months old react to happy songs, according to studies, and by 9 months, they are affected by sad songs as well.
Lately, there’s been a ton of medical research on the ways in which music can be used to make us healthier. It can boost our immune systems, especially after surgery, lower stress and blood pressure, and decrease levels of depression and anxiety.
Train Your Brain With Music
So if music has such a wide (and often positive) impact on our brains, is there anything we can do to train our brains with music to make us smarter, more creative, and more innovative?
Turns out, we can. Studies suggest that listening to music when, or just before, trying to solve problems can be a very good idea since people tend to solve problems much more creatively when they’re listening to upbeat music. It goes to reason. You want an innovative solution, you need to be more creative. To be more creative, you need to be in a good and happy mood. And to be in a good and happy mood instantly, music is the perfect solution.
But music can do more than just make you happy. It can make you relax. But there’s more. Kayt Sukel, a science writer and the author of “This is Your Brain on Sex: The Science Behind the Search for Love,” talks about the “musician’s advantage,” an observation made by educators, scientists, and researchers over several decades that students who pick up musical instruments tend to excel in academics, are taking the lead in measures of vocabulary, reading, and nonverbal reasoning, and attention skills, just to name a few.
In fact, research conducted at the University of Texas at Arlington concluded that musical training might be a promising treatment option for people who struggle with cognitive challenges since musicians typically have an advantage when it comes to long-term memory.
In their study, they measured the electrical activity of neurons in the brains of 14 different musicians who had studied classical music for at least 15 years. They had them play memory games with both words and pictures. Through a test of both working and long-term memory, they learned that the musicians scored far higher than a control group of nonmusicians on the working memory tasks. The musicians also scored higher for pictures. “Our work is adding evidence that music training is a good way to improve cognitive abilities,” the study’s lead author Dr. Heekyeong Park, a psychologist at UTA, said in a statement.
So while we might be able to live without music, the question is why would we? Its ability to change and improve our lives for the better knows no boundaries.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2015 issue of Brain World Magazine.
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