The human brain's reaction to music
music and the brain
Music as a stimulant of the brain
- The brain releases dopamine when we listen to music
- Recent studies suggest a shared processing between language and music at a certain level, but they are also different. Music is based on emotions, whereas language is more based on meaning.
- The medical field uses music in order to improve, maintain or try to recover cognitive, physical, emotional and social functioning, and to help to slow down the progress of different medical conditions.
- Emotion, expression, social skills, linguistic and mathematical skills, visuospatial and motor skills, attention, memory, executive functions, decision making, autonomy, creativity, emotional and cognitive flexibility, all come together in music.
Brain activity while playing or listening to music
- The responsibility that we feel pleasure when we hear a song is in a group of neurons of the brain, known as nucleus accumbens.
- When we listen to music, many parts of the brain are activated. In particular, evolved and complex areas, such as those corresponding to the sensory, emotional and executive areas, participate in the emotional response we have when we hear a certain song.
- The fact that we like music so much can also be explained because it helps us remember events that happened in the past. Moreover, we can relive specific emotions and have specific patterns of learning through songs.
Comparison of the brain at rest and the same person's brain while listening to music
- When a pianist is performing a musical work, he uses the left hemisphere of the brain. In the moments when he reads the score, the occipital area of the brain is activated, which is where the visual information is processed. Then, when the musician is going to play the musical notes that he has read in the score, the brain area that will send the commands to the muscles of the hands is activated.
- Practising this for a lot of time causes a structural change, a hypertrophy of the left temporal lobe, around the language area, three or four times wider than that of a non-musician.
Comparison between a musician’s brain and a non-musician’s brain
Music and emotions
- The appreciation of music is tied to the ability to process this structure, and to predict what will happen or sound next in the song. But this structure has to involve something unexpected, or it becomes emotionally empty.
- Composers manipulate the emotion in a song by knowing what their audience’s expectations are and controlling when those will (or will not) be met. This manipulation is what causes the chills that are part of any emotional song.
- Music involves subtle violations of timing and, because we know through experience that music is not threatening, these are identified by the frontal lobes as something pleasant.
- The brain’s emotional, language and memory centres are connected during the processing of music. The extent of this connection is variable among different people, which is how some musicians have the ability to create pieces of music which have a great emotional quality and some others don't.