This Is Your Body on Music
We asked experts how music affects the brain, our emotions and everything else.
Artist Louise Bourgeois listened to it at night, using childhood melodies to soothe herself during regular bouts of insomnia. Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, preferred Bach, as did neurologist Oliver Sacks. Haruki Murakami, longtime runner, has dilated at length on the subject of the tracks he uses while training for marathons, saying, “[s]ometimes when I run, I listen to jazz, but usually it’s rock, since its beat is the best accompaniment to the rhythm of running. I prefer the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gorillaz, and Beck, and oldies like Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Beach Boys.”
Human beings have long understood that music can dramatically alter our experience. Sacks wrote that “for virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly ‘musical.’ This propensity to music — this ‘musicophilia’ — shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species.”
It’s only over the last 30-plus years, though, that we’ve amassed the science to more specifically describe this instinctual turn toward the musical. Today, an enormous and growing body of research attempts to talk specifically about just how and why music affects us so much. Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, we’ve seen that the same neural systems involved in processing rhythm also govern motor control in the body. We’ve also discovered the so-called Levitin Effect, which explains how our brains, via long-term memory, can recall the melodies of popular songs. And we know that as a result of their training, musicians show all kinds of anatomical adaptations — essentially granting them superpowers where it comes to certain neurological functions, like the ability to imagine or “see” sound.
Not surprisingly, in the age of infinite self-enhancement, we also want to apply that science. These days every streaming service, from Pandora to Spotify, offers curated playlists that promise curative effects. It’s not enough just to listen anymore; we’re trying to hack music so that it can optimize our lives.
So just what do we know? I talked to a range of audiophiles, from musicologists to neurologists and piano players to professors, and here’s what they had to say about music’s emotional and physiological impact on our bodies and brains.
The Experts
Dr. Meagan Curtis, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Purchase College
Dr. Charles Limb, Chief of the Division of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at University of California, San Francisco & jazz pianist
Henna-Riikka Peltola, Musicologist and Professor of Music, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Dan Piccoli, singer & songwriter for the folk/blues band The Fine Machines
The Brain
As Daniel Levitin explains in his layperson’s bible on the subject, This Is Your Brain on Music, our experience of listening relies on the fact that “the brain is a massively parallel device, with operations distributed widely throughout. There is no single language center, nor is there a single music center. Rather, there are regions that perform component operations, and other regions that coordinate the bringing together of this information.”
The experts we spoke with all seem to agree: listening to and performing music recruits and engages our entire neural machine. What’s more, listening to music can confer certain longterm benefits on the brain and sensory functions.
“Music stimulates almost every area of the brain — sensorimotor, auditory, visual, memory, cognitive, reward, cerebellar and more,” Dr. Limb explains. “In terms of cerebral stimulation, it is one of the most remarkable stimuli in how vast a response it induces in the listener. Repeated listening over time, or repeated training over years, changes the brain’s ability to process sound — makes it more efficient, more attuned, more capable. And specialized abilities such as perfect pitch also appear to be linked to a period of early music exposure in nearly every case.”
Learning to play a musical instrument can also help protect our hearing as we age. According to Dr. Curtis, some research indicates that “the musical brain becomes quite adept at auditory pattern recognition, which can help people understand speech — even in noisy settings. Those who have some musical training have more protection against the consequences of moderate hearing loss.”
In addition to our auditory sense, music can also be used to preserve our ability to speak. “One group of researchers is working with patients who’ve lost the ability to speak, generally due to a left-hemisphere stroke,” Dr. Curtis notes. “As long as the right hemisphere is undamaged, these patients can still sing, and this preserved ability is used to help them regain language. The patients are taught to sing the words that they wish to say, and through extensive training, they gradually shift from singing to speaking. Through this process, the execution of language — which once relied largely on the left hemisphere — is transferred to the intact right hemisphere.”
Beyond the mechanics of music’s impact on cognitive and sensory function, there is perhaps some magic at work, too. Music allows us to process thoughts and emotions via catharsis. “As a songwriter,” Dan Piccoli says, “having some understanding of tension and release has improved my problem-solving, patience, ability to clearly and directly articulate my brain. I write songs for this reason, because I have an emotional problem I want to solve, work through, or just admit to.”
Emotions
Ian Dury was right — sex, drugs, and rock & roll really are a naturally occurring triad. The same areas of the mind involved in feelings of pleasure and reward get turned on, so to speak, when we listen to music. So, it turns out that music is its own kind of mind altering substance.
“Strong emotional responses to music have been linked to many areas of the brain, including the ventral striatum and midbrain areas. These regions are associated with things that are biologically rewarding, such as the attainment of food and sex,” Dr. Curtis explains. She also points out that these are the same parts of the brain from which pleasurable responses to drugs originate — which begs the question, “Does music hijack these areas, like drugs, or does it have real biological value?” The truth is, we’re not entirely sure.
“Listening to music also stimulates the limbic regions linked to memory and emotion processing,” Dr Limb elaborates. “This sheds some light on why sad music also is rewarding — since it is a case in which negative (that is, normally aversive) stimuli are delivered in a safe context, thereby being converted into a positive phenomenon for the listener.”
Add to this the rich associations that coalesce around particular compositions, and music becomes a perfect delivery mechanism for all our feelings. “Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that can’t conceive of it being an isolated thing,” writes David Byrne in How Music Works. “It’s whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.”
Dr. Peltola explains this concept in more detail: “Music psychologists have identified different cognitive mechanisms that are relevant for emotional responses to music. These include evaluative conditioning, which means that the felt emotion is a result of repeated pairing of emotional stimulus with a certain piece of music; emotional contagion, which means that without consciously noticing it, we internally mimic the emotion we perceive from the music, possibly utilizing empathy-related pathways or mirror neurons; visual imagery, which means that music triggers our imagination, and we feel emotions because of certain visual imagery we conjure up; episodic memory, which means that music evokes memories in us, which induces certain emotions — these are usually related to our own autobiographical associations; and musical expectancy, which means that we have certain unconscious expectations about the continuation of the music we hear. If these expectations are confirmed, suspended or violated, then we experience emotions as a result.”
The Body
Music’s effects aren’t limited to above the neck — just as much of the experience of listening to and performing music happens below. Among its other boons, music can boost immunity, ease muscle tension, and lower blood pressure.
“Music alters much of our metabolic processing, such as heart rate, respiratory rate and EEG patterns,” notes Dr. Limb. Though the ways in which this happens are still highly individual: “we tend to slow down with slower music and speed up with faster music. Music can lead to endorphins and ‘chills,’ which have been linked to higher pain thresholds, although this is less well understood thus far.”
Dr. Curtis elaborates on this concept: “Music engages your attention and can have a positive emotional influence, which are two things that matter when it comes to pain tolerance.” This evidence, she notes, has been borne out in both laboratory testing and real-world scenarios. “Patients who listen to music after surgery tend to have easier recoveries than those who don’t, and some studies have noted earlier discharge times and the consumption of less pain medication in patients who’ve listened to music as part of their post-op recovery.” Perhaps this explains why practically everyone — from casual runners to high-performance athletes — rely on hype music before doing their thing.
Everyone we spoke with said that, in this regard, preference matters much more than genre; in other words, if you’re looking to bodyhack, make sure you’re playing something you really enjoy.
Piccoli notes that the experience of actually playing with other musicians can be “tense, just like any conversation between people without instruments, before a common language is established.” He explains that, experientially, “there are moments of understanding that make me sit up straighter, make my voice louder.” When he’s by himself, he’ll tap his foot lightly to keep time, but with other musicians his musical body takes over. “I hinge my whole leg, I stomp. I become less aware of my body, less aware of my motions or positions unrelated to the music, especially in group situations. All my attention and resource is devoted to the parts of my body that make the music: swinging my arm, stomping my leg, and shouting out the melody.”
While we’re still drawing the map of music’s impact on body, mind, and spirit, its effects on us are profound. And even after scientific study reaches a limit on what we’re able to name, the sounds that remain will still be as powerful, and mysterious as ever.
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