Music Therapy and Neuroscience: Opportunities and Challenges

Neuroscience involves the study of the nervous system at a molecular, cellular, and systems level. Drawing on cellular and systems models, the related disciplines of neuropsychology, cognitive, and behavioural neuroscience explore how neural systems relate to each other to generate a range of behaviours and cognitive functions.

Here, research in brain processes moves to theories on cognitive faculties enabling consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory, or the mind. In all these areas of brain activity, our experience of music, in particular the way it engages our emotions, memory, cognition, and movement/motor activity are intimately related.

Human responses to music may be viewed through a neuroscience lens with increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technology, providing neurological and biomedical measures of psychological states. These developments have been harnessed in collaborative research investigations seeking to develop the therapeutic applications of music.

Music Therapy and Neuroscience: Areas of Convergence

Since the development of neuro-imaging technology in the 1980s, neuroscientists have been able to provide evidence of musically induced neuroplasticity. The repeated activity of practice and performance of music, activating as it does so many neuronal systems, offers neuroscientist the perfect area in which to study neuroplasticity, by focussing on anatomical and connectivity differences between musicians and non-musicians.

An established view amongst neuroscientists is that the emotional power of music stems from the way it activates dynamic aspects of neural systems usually implicated in the production of emotions such as joy and sadness. The emotional effects stem from how these systems are both independent of, and highly involved with cognitive processes.

Music and Cognition

Music perception alone involves a host of cognitive processes including encoding, storage, and decoding of information and events relating to musical experiences; musical performance extends these processes to reading, motor planning, decision making and so on. The neuroscience and music therapy literature in this area lags behind the literature relating to motor, speech and emotion domains in terms of volume, however from a theoretical perspective, informed by studies with healthy subjects, there are some promising developments.

Music and Relationship

Music is arguably the most social of all art-forms. Furthermore, with the exception of purely music listening (receptive) methods, or music medicine approaches where recorded music might be prescribed, music therapy is a live, dynamic process involving two or more participants jointly improvising, singing, or creating compositions together. Whilst traditional neuroscience may have viewed the nervous system in a vacuum devoid of social influence, the comparatively recent development of social neuroscience explores the neuro-biological structures and mechanisms implicated in social processes and behaviour.

Music Therapy Research Using Neuroscience Methods

• Dementia
  The area of musically supported cognitive rehabilitation is of particular interest to the growing field of dementia research. Using a battery of neuropsychogical tests, Särkämö and colleagues (2014) found music-based interventions may be beneficial in maintaining cognitive as well as emotional, and social functioning. Furthermore Jacobsen et al. (2015) used fMRI methods to delineate an area of the brain dedicated to musical memory that survives the damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
  Whilst music therapy neuroscience collaborations are lacking in this field, Hsu and Monkton (2014) have conducted a pilot study incorporating HRV analysis of music therapy/client pairings, where physiological data revealed modulation in emotional arousal during improvisatory music therapy.
  The authors believe this may enable identification of sensory cues during sessions, guiding the therapist to reduce symptoms such as anxiety. A further pilot study in sound stimulation with this population shows promising results.

Music Therapy and Neuroscience: The Way Forward

Whilst the more nebulous, interpersonal aspects of music therapy may always evade measurement from EEG, fMRI etc., technological advances in neuroscience methods promise future opportunities for meaningful research, particularly for in situ studies exploring the music therapy process. For example, increasingly accessible portable and wireless EEG technology might allow for a more naturalistic data capture of neural activity. Furthermore HRV is an underused yet practical and non-invasive method to underpin behavioural assessment with new insights of neural activity relating to physiological, cognitive and emotional aspects of practice.