Emma Kenney

Music has been an important part of society for centuries. From the earliest human civilizations to today, music has been used to express emotion and keep record of both historical events and the way of life of a certain people or era. It is hard to deny music has an impact on human culture, but what impact does music have on the human brain?

Research conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology answers the long posed question, “Does music impact its own section of the brain, or does it simply affect the portion of the brain involving speaking and responding to the speech of others?” Their studies shows while music causes multiple areas to react, it specifically causes one to react only associated with music, not with speech or other sounds within one’s environment. A report written by Anne Trafton on the matter explains:

The finding was enabled by a new method designed to identify neural populations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Using this method, the researchers identified six neural populations with different functions, including the music-selective population and another set of neurons that responds selectively to speech.

“The music result is notable because people had not been able to clearly see highly selective responses to music before,” says Sam Norman-Haignere, a postdoc at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

“Our findings are hard to reconcile with the idea that music piggybacks entirely on neural machinery that is optimized for other functions, because the neural responses we see are highly specific to music,” says Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

According to an article published by the National Institute of Health, music can actually provide relief to those in physical pain: “Several well-controlled studies have found that listening to music can alleviate pain or reduce the need for pain medications. Other research suggests that music can benefit heart disease patients by reducing their blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety.” This can be partially linked to the calming effect music is able to produce.

This can be seen when you examine students who listen to classical music before tests. Studies have shown this specific type of music causes the brain to release neurons that encourage the human body to relax and the mind to combat anxiety and stress. Professional bassoon player Lawrence O’Donnell wrote an essay explaining the effects of this. His essay also describes how music is tied to recall. Students who listened to the same genre of music while studying and taking a test received higher marks than those who listened to one genre of music while studying and a different genre while taking the test. He goes on to explain this is tied mainly to the impact of music tempo, not to the style of music itself. O’Donnell states:

One simple way students can improve test scores is by listening to certain types of music such as Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major before taking a test. This type of music releases neurons in the brain which help the body to relax. The effectiveness of Mozart’s sonatas can be seen by the results from an IQ test performed on three groups of college students. The first group listened to a Mozart sonata before taking the test. The second group listened to a relaxation tape before their test. The third group did not listen to anything before the test. The first group had the highest score with an average of 119.

The second group ended up with an average of 111, and the third group had the lowest score with an average of 110.

William Balach, Kelly Bowman, and Lauri Mohler, all from Pennsylvania State University, studied the effects of music genre and tempo on memory retention. They had four groups learn vocabulary words using one of four instrumental pieces — slow classical, slow jazz, fast classical, and fast jazz. Each of the four groups was divided into smaller groups for the recall test. These sub groups used either the same (i.e., slow classical, slow classical) or different (i.e., slow jazz, fast classical) pieces when taking the recall test. The results did show a dependency on the music. Recall was better when the music was the same during learning and testing. These same researchers did another test which [sic] restricted the changes in the music to just tempo (i.e., slow to fast jazz) or just genre (i.e., slow jazz to slow classical). Surprisingly, the results showed that changing the genre had no effect on recall but changing the tempo decreased recall.

The effects of music on the brain as a whole become increasingly more complex and impressive when you take a closer look at how it works. It is common knowledge that when music, like sound, enters the brain it is processed by certain nerves; however, it is only recently we have stated to see how that process works for music specifically. The National Institute of Health states:

Scientists have long known that when music and other sounds enter the ear, they’re converted to electrical signals. The signals travel up the auditory nerve to the brain’s auditory cortex, which processes sound. From there, the brain’s responses to music become much more complex.

Over the past decade, new brain imaging techniques have shown that music activates many unexpected brain regions. It can turn on areas involved in emotion and memory. It can also activate the brain’s motor regions, which prepare for and coordinate physical movement.

Studies conducted by Dr. Petr Janata, a neuroscientist from the University of California Davis, show music especially has an impact on a portion of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex. This portion of the brain has a role in both decision making and retaining memories. Dr. Janata used a process called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to examine the brain activity of certain individuals when they listened to music. Dr. Janata’s studies essentially showed the medial prefrontal cortex is capable of linking familiar music to the memories of an individual, especially those the individual finds important. In Dr. Janata’s words:

Dorsal regions of the MPFC (Brodmann area 8/9) were shown to respond parametrically to the degree of autobiographical salience experienced over the course of individual 30 s excerpts. Moreover, the dorsal MPFC also responded on a second, faster timescale corresponding to the signature movements of the musical excerpts through tonal space. These results suggest that the dorsal MPFC associates music and memories when we experience emotionally salient episodic memories that are triggered by familiar songs from our personal past. MPFC acted in concert with lateral prefrontal and posterior cortices both in terms of tonality tracking and overall responsiveness to familiar and autobiographically salient songs.

The effects of music on the medial prefrontal cortex can explain why those with Alzheimer’s are able to recognize music from their past even after other memories have been lost. Dr. Janata’s studies have shown this portion of the brain is one of the last to deteriorate, meaning the memories associated with this region, those revolving around music, will remain even after others have been forgotten.

Music has an even greater impact on the brains of those who play instruments. Dr. Gottfried Schlaug conducted research with Dr. Christian Gaser that shows the brains of professional musicians not only have thicker bundles of nerves connecting the right and left sides but have more grey matter as well. This is significant when one takes into account that the grey matter of the brain is responsible for muscle control and sensory perception; that is, it is responsible for functions such as self-control, speech, and decision making. Dr. Schlaug states:

In comparing these three groups (professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non-musicians), areas with a significant positive correlation between musician status and increase in gray matter volume were found in perirolandic regions including primary motor and somatosensory areas, premotor areas, anterior superior parietal areas, and in the inferior temporal gyrus bilaterally. A positive correlation means that the gray matter volume is highest in professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians.

Dr. Schlaug has also researched whether music has an effect on the brains of children. His studies show music has as much of an effect on children as it does on adults. Children who took 15 months of music lessons experienced changes to the portion of the brain responsible for motor control and human rhythm. This tie between music and the brain could be key to improving the motor skills of those with conditions relating to a loss of movement. The children who took music lessons also had a greater ability to execute and control finger movement and multi-task. Dr. Schlaug states:

As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of the effects of music training on brain, behavioral, and cognitive development in young children — here we investigated structural brain changes in relation to behavioral changes in young children who received 15 months of instrumental musical training relative to a group of children who did not…. As predicted, Instrumental children showed greater behavioral improvements over the 15 months on the finger motor task and the melody/rhythmic tasks, but not on the nonmusical tasks. In addition, Instrumental children showed areas of greater relative voxel size change over the 15 months as compared to Controls in motor brain areas, such as the right precentral gyrus (motor hand area), and the corpus callosum (4th and 5th segment/midbody), as well as in a right primary auditory region (Heschl’s gyrus). These brain deformation differences are consistent with structural brain differences found between adult musicians and non-musicians in the precentral gyri, the corpus callosum, and auditory cortex…. These results are important from a functional perspective since these brain regions are known to be of critical importance in instrumental music performance and auditory processing. For example, the primary motor area plays a critical role in motor planning, execution, and control of bimanual sequential finger movements as well as motor learning.

A similar study was conducted by the Journal of Neuroscience. Their research shows on top of helping children with motor skills, playing an instrument can actually help improve a child’s ability to process information. This study followed at risk children as they participated in a music program. The behavior of these children improved greatly as they continued to be allowed to play music. This music program, called the Harmony Project, partnered with Dr. Nina Kraus to study the effects of music on the brains of the kids and whether learning an instrument actually helped with the ability to process and therefor understand human speech.

An NPR article written by Cory Turner describes the experiment of the two as follows:

Harmony Project is the brainchild of Margaret Martin, whose life path includes parenting two kids while homeless before earning a doctorate in public health. A few years ago, she noticed something remarkable about the kids who had gone through her program.

In other research, Kraus had noticed something about the brains of kids who come from poverty, like many in the Harmony Project. These children often hear fewer words by age 5 than other kids do.

“And that’s a problem,” Kraus says, because “in the absence of stimulation, the nervous system … hungry for stimulation … will make things up. So, in the absence of sound, what we saw is that there was just more random background activity, which you might think of as static.”

In addition to that “neural noise,” as Kraus calls it, ability to process sound — like telling the difference between someone saying ba and ga — requires microsecond precision in the brain. And many kids raised in poverty, Kraus says, simply have a harder time doing it; individual sounds can seem “blurry” to the brain.

Working with Harmony Project, Kraus randomly assigned several dozen kids from the program’s waitlist into two groups: those who would be studied after one year of music lessons and those who would be studied after two years.

And what she found was that in the two-year kids, the static didn’t go away. But their brains got better — more precise — at processing sound. In short: less blur.

It goes back to pitch, timing and timbre. Kraus argues that learning music improves the brain’s ability to process all three, which helps kids pick up language, too. Consonants and vowels become clearer, and the brain can make sense of them more quickly.

Studies conducted by John Hopkins Medicine show listening to music or playing an instrument has the same effect on the brain as working out has on the body. It can be extremely useful in delaying the aging process of the brain. JHM states:

If you want to firm up your body, head to the gym. If you want to exercise your brain, listen to music.

“There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does,” says one Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist. “If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.”

“Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it,” notes one otolaryngologist.

Listen to what your kids or grandkids listen to, experts suggest. Often we continue to listen to the same songs and genre of music that we did during our teens and 20s, and we generally avoid hearing anything that’s not from that era.

New music challenges the brain in a way that old music doesn’t. It might not feel pleasurable at first, but that unfamiliarity forces the brain to struggle to understand the new sound.

It is easy to see music has a large impact on the brain. It helps with things ranging from muscle control to memory retention to improved speech and self control. As scientists continue to make new discoveries involving music and the brain, we might one day unlock a whole new way of life revolving around the vast effects of music on the human brain.

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