Episode #2 - Music and Your Brain

Check out the amazing things that happen in your head when you listen to music! Jack and Bob take a look at your brain on music.

Mentioned in the episode: University of Central Florida: Your Brain On Music. https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music/

Daniel J. Levitin - The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature: https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music/

Transcript

This episode is going to focus on the importance of music on a physiological level, but don’t worry! I’m not a PhD or really even all that smart, but I have some information I found super interesting that I really want to share. 

This bizarre journey I have been undertaking all these many years has given me one thing – music in all its forms. My career path, my life path, my relationships and my sense of self all revolve around music, and that makes me not all that different from everyone else. 

Our relationship with music is a hard-wired thing, and the more we indulge our link to music the more it fires up our brains.

When you sit and listen to music – not in the background but as an active participant, no less than eleven sections of your brain become active, and not just active, but excited.

The frontal lobe, which is the part that separates us from all the other creatures on the planet, goes into an enhanced activity state. This is your thinking and perception area. Meanwhile the temporal lobe, which controls what we hear – no surprise there – gets a full workout. The temporal lobe spans both sides of our brains. The left side interprets language, and the right side interprets rhythm and musical structure. Even Alzheimer’s patients in the most advanced stages of their dreadful disease respond to music when they aren’t able to respond to anything else. Alzheimer’s patients who are musicians often retain their ability to play their instrument long after their other cognitive functions have left them. With music, areas that help you communicate better, analyze situations better, remember things, and maintain muscle memory, are all excited simultaneously.

Our pleasure centers are excited the same way a narcotic excites them, and our most primitive area – the amygdala, which processes emotion – lights up. Music can calm anxiety and fear while making you happier. It can also be the best friend you’ll ever have when your significant other leaves you for the gardener, and just to agonize you further, she takes the dog and leaves you with the Forever 21 credit card bill. Music doesn’t judge, it just hangs out with you.

Music helps our brains produce new neurons, enabling us to produce new memories and solidly retain old ones. That’s why that cute girl in tenth grade who barely paid attention to you even though you were madly in love with her – I’m looking at you Donna from English Lit – jumps straight into your head when you hear whatever song it is that reminds you of her. At the same time, music fires up the hypothalamus to release hormones that do good things like moderate hunger and mood, regulate your heart rate and breathing and stimulate your metabolism. 

Music acts as a bridge in the part of your brain that controls communication between your logical side (the left) and your intuitive side (the right) – basically it makes your brain work better. Rhythm increases dopamine and can help Parkinson’s patients get a little relief.

But wait! There’s more! As if all of that wasn’t enough, music also excites the part of your brain that processes visual stimulation. Trained musicians actually use this part of the brain when listening to music to see what they are listening to, which means with a little training and practice, it’s probably possible for all of us to ‘see’ what we hear.

If you want to dig in deeper into any of this, the University of Central Florida has a husband and wife team who have been studying this stuff and publishing their findings for twenty years. One half of the team is a neuroscientist and the other is renowned classical musician, and their findings are fascinating. They’ve posted up an amazing resource, and the link to their website is listed in this week’s show notes.   https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music/  

As a side note, this is also the reason why most people stop imprinting new music on their brains after about 33 or 34 years old. The connections and transmitters are still forming up to that point, and once your brain is set in its ways so to speak, it no longer needs to use music as an emotional filing system. Sure, most people continue to enjoy new music throughout their lives, but by your early thirties, “your music” is a set thing.

Several other studies have been published that assert that music is only important because we humans find it pleasurable. Personally, that point of view doesn’t look deeply enough at the science. And it also kind of ignores what almost every human on the planet’s reality is. Something that fires up our entire brains, connects generations and disparate groups of people while being nearly universally important to humans on every corner of the globe is not just some pleasurable thing, like a Twinkie or a bag of chips. Those things are pleasurable too, but they don’t carry the weight of music. See what I did there? Music doesn’t make you fat, assuming you don’t eat too many Twinkies while you’re munching out on a Saturday night listening to Dark Side of the Moon and watching the Wizard of Oz with the sound off. But I digress.

Daniel J. Levitin is another world-famous researcher and music industry veteran who has written a number of books on the subject of music and neuroscience. I have an incredibly dog-eared and marked up copy of his 2008 book The World in Six Songs which is another utterly fascinating look at the human side of music.

He states, with a lot of backup and some serious authority, that music serves to preserve our emotional heritage. Regardless of your ethnic extraction, have you ever been stirred by the sound of bagpipes lilting over a valley, or a pan flute? My humanity stirs when I hear a kalimba – an African melodic instrument, while it also is stirred by the sound of a koto, yet I am neither African nor Japanese. But I am human and that’s the beauty of deeply connecting to music – it allows you to connect to your humanity and your deep ancestral roots. I mean your way back roots. It’s something we all share even though most of us are sadly kind of out of practice in the fine art of intentional listening. 

If you’ve let technology put a barrier up between you and your music, rethink your relationship. Now that we live in a world of constant elevator music, whether we’re in an elevator or think we’re enjoying some tunes via our Bluetooth personal assistant, there’s an entire aspect of our humanity that isn’t being served because we no longer have a deep, intimate relationship with our music. 

So, there you have your brains on music.