èßäAV

Arts & Wellbeing
Ask a Scientist: Explore connections between music and science.

Q: Why do I have emotional responses to music?

A: Nearly everyone enjoys listening to music (since you are sitting here reading this note, you probably enjoy music as much as, if not more than, most people!). We say “nearly everyone,” because there is a small subset of the population (between 1-5% of people) who have what scientists call musical anhedonia. Musical anhedonia is a selective lack of pleasure from music. It is “selective” because individuals with musical anhedonia still derive pleasure from other activities, such as eating a good meal or enjoying a conversation with friends, but they just don’t enjoy music.

By studying individuals with musical anhedonia, we have learned about what makes music so rewarding to the rest of us! Neuropsychological and neuroimaging research on people with musical anhedonia has helped identify the brain structures involved in musical reward: Musical anhedonia seems to stem from disconnections between the reward regions of the brain (i.e., the “pleasure centers”) and brain structures involved in actually perceiving sounds. That is, we find music rewarding because it activates both structures for hearing sounds AND structures for feeling pleasure! When these connections are disrupted, people no longer derive pleasure from music.

But what is it about music that activates these auditory and reward structures in such a way that makes us feel emotions when we listen to it? One prominent theory is that music evokes emotions because it takes advantage of the reward associated with setting expectations and fulfilling those expectations. We have all been exposed to music throughout our lifetimes. This exposure has taught us, even implicitly, the typical patterns that music takes. Certain chords are more likely to follow from other chords, for example. We therefore have learned certain expectations for music. Even musically untrained listeners can tell when something sounds “off” or surprising in a musical piece. Our brains find it rewarding to predict what comes next, and to be right about those predictions! But, we can’t be right all the time – music is enjoyable when there is a balance between being predictable yet surprising. Too predictable, and it’s boring; too surprising, and we can’t make sense of it! Therefore, these predictive processes are one way in which music is suggested to evoke pleasure in listeners.

–Dr. Amy Belfi, Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology

Q: Why do I think of different memories when I listen to different pieces of music?

A: Most of us have probably had the experience of hearing music that suddenly triggers a memory. For example, a snippet of your favorite song from high school could prompt a vivid image of driving around your hometown on a hot summer night with your friends, singing along to the radio with the windows open. This seems almost effortless at times—it may be a song you haven’t heard or a memory you haven’t thought about in years, but it all comes flooding back with just a few notes.

Research on the connections between music and memories—these types of memories are what researchers refer to as “autobiographical memories”—is in fairly early stages. We’ve realized music-evoked memories are more detailed, vivid, and emotional than memories evoked by images, words, TV shows, or food. Music has also been shown to be effective at triggering memories in people with dementia, including individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.

While we are still trying to figure out the how and why, one idea is that music can be a highly emotional cue and emotions can facilitate memory retrieval. Music is also usually present at emotional moments in our lives, which are in turn likely to be stored in our memory. There is still much work left to be done, but I guess we’ll put on a good record and get started.

–Dr. Amy Belfi, Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology

Q: What is going on in my brain when I’m enjoying a beautiful piece of music?

A: Music is like an on-switch for the brain. Nowhere is this more evident than when one immerses themselves in the process of enjoying a beautiful piece of music. While the act of perceiving music may seem like a relatively simple thing, the truth is that the neurological mechanisms that allow this simple act to take place are extraordinarily complex! Each stage of this process constitutes an entire field of science that researchers have devoted their entire careers to understanding.

First, we need to ask ourselves the most fundamental of questions: What is music? All sound, music included, is a vibration—acoustic energy that moves the air in an invisible way that can be captured by our eardrums. This energy is transferred through three tiny bones called the malleus, incus, and the stapes, collectively known as the ossicles, into the inner ear (the cochlea), where the process of converting music from vibration into electricity occurs. The inner ear acts like a frequency analyzer, sending bass information to the tip of the spiral-shaped cochlea and treble information to the opposite end, known as the base. Through this stage where vibrations are transduced into electricity, music becomes a series of nerve impulses that travel down the all-important auditory nerves to reach the brainstem, where the music is then relayed upward to the brain.

Within the brain, music is relayed to the temporal lobes, areas of the brain that sit just above our ears. The first brain region that receives this music is known as the primary auditory cortex, which analyzes the music and then distributes it first to auditory processing areas of the brain—widely throughout the brain—to sensory processing areas, motor control areas, language centers, memory centers, and areas involved in consciousness. In addition to these cortical areas, music also stimulates limbic and emotional centers of the brain involved in reward and pleasure.

In fact, research has revealed that the entire brain can be stimulated by music, from areas involved in processing visual information, rhythmic movement, logical thought, to deep emotion. Perhaps the multiplicity of brain areas engaged by music is one of the key reasons that music is one of the most powerful stimulants there is for the brain. In this way, neuroscience may be able to explain exactly why and how.

–Dr. Charles Limb, Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Chief of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at UC San Francisco

Q: Why is music important to the brain?

A: Music is nutrition for the brain. How can something that is abstract, invisible, and without any obvious survival advantage provide such nourishment? It has to do with the incredibly diverse ways in which music stimulates the brain. Although music begins as sound in the air, it ultimately enters our brains in the form of electricity—neural signals that trigger profound responses in many different parts of the brain.

It is perhaps in the musician where we see the most obvious benefits for music on the brain. To begin with, musicians, who spend their lives paying close attention to sound, have been shown actually to have a heightened sense of listening compared to non-musicians. It is not that they do better on hearing tests than non-musicians, it’s that their processing of the sound that they are hearing is more robust and accurate. The same phenomenon is likely true of music lovers, who spend a great deal of time listening to music. You can think of musicians as “auditory athletes”—able to do things with sound that normal people can’t easily do. Playing a musical instrument similarly has important beneficial effects on the brain, where the addition of fine motor control needed to physically play an instrument reinforces how deeply music is embedded in the brain, helping to develop our brain’s capacity for memory, muscle coordination, timing, emotion processing, spatial processing, among others.

Even in non-musicians, the impact of music on the brain is profound. Whether it’s the observation that people who stutter when speaking may be able to sing with complete fluency, or the ways that hearing a favorite song can awaken the mind of one with severe dementia and cognitive decline, music therapists have shown us time and again that music can tap into parts of the brain that help us heal. It appears that music has untapped potential for helping those with depression and related disorders of mood. By being able to capture and express the full range of human emotions, music provides an impactful way for us to know that we are not alone in this world, that whatever we may be feeling at that time has been experienced by others as well and will be in the future. It connects our modern lives today with the lives of those in the past, where the musical emotion so beautifully represented in the music of Bach rings clear and true today just as it did when Bach was composing. By stimulating the reward and pleasure centers of the brain, music literally promotes happiness and joy within the brain, enhancing our well-being and reminding us of how it feels to be alive. Although scientists have yet to fully understand it, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: as it soothes the soul, music helps heal the brain.

–Dr. Charles Limb, Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Chief of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at UC San Francisco

Q: I feel the beat and need to tap my toe—why does that feel compulsive?

A: Moving along to music is an instinctive human reaction, found in every known culture. Even in settings where movement is discouraged, like a quiet concert, it can be impossible to resist discreetly tapping a toe. This pleasurable urge to move to music is called ‘groove’ by music researchers. Certain genres of music, like funk, tend to be higher in groove than others. The experience of groove is tightly tied to the rhythm of the music: we experience the most groove when listening to rhythms that are neither too simple nor too complex, but instead in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, with a bit of syncopation or swing. Because syncopation puts musical notes ‘off’ the beat, we are more inclined to move.

Movement helps us keep track of the beat in syncopated music, which then enables us to follow the rhythm. Humans really like to find the structure in our environment, and the beat is a key structural element that lets us 'understand' music. We enjoy listening to rhythms that have a beat, but if you jumble up the sounds and make them random, we do not enjoy that. Syncopation is a sweet spot between boring and too hard: it challenges us a bit with the off-beat notes, so we respond to that challenge by marking the beat with our movements, which helps us keep track of the beat. If music is too syncopated, even movement can't help, and we lose the beat, and along with it our ability to understand and enjoy the rhythm.

Movement allows us to strengthen our feeling of the beat so that we don’t lose track of it. When people are asked to define groove, the most common words they use include “move,” “beat,” “rhythm,” and “dance,” demonstrating that our experience of groove is intimately bound to movement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, groovy music also lights up brain areas that are associated with movement. Researchers also see reward-related brain networks come online, likely because groove feels good. Groove’s feel-good qualities can be harnessed to intensify a workout or quicken our walking pace. Music therapies for Parkinson’s disease also exploit the power of groove, by providing music with a steady beat to improve walking. Groove thus embodies the powerful relationship between music and movement, which both feels good and can have therapeutic benefits.

–Dr. Jessica Grahn, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Western University

Q: I know someone who has ‘two left feet’—why is that?

A: The human urge to move to music starts very early: even 4-month-old babies wiggle their arms and legs when they hear music. But our ability to move ‘in sync’ with a musical beat takes quite a lot longer to develop. Children can clap accurately to a beat as young as two years of age, but five or six is more common. Some of us just never seem to master this ability, even as adults. At the extreme end of the spectrum are those that scientists categorize as ‘beat-deaf’. Beat-deaf individuals struggle to synchronize to the music, and even to perceive the beat at all. They struggle to tell if someone else is synchronizing to the beat, let alone move accurately themselves. Some beat-deaf individuals can synchronize to a metronome, but not music, suggesting they have a hard time extracting the beat from more complex sounds. In the middle of the spectrum, we have individuals who can usually hear the beat in the music, and will notice if the beat is mistimed significantly, but may still struggle to synchronize their own movements to the beat. These are many of the people with ‘two left feet’, which seems to reflect both innate differences as well as a lack of practice or training. Interestingly, the desire to move along often exists even when someone is inaccurate, just like in children. However, someone with poorer ability early in life may become self-conscious, opting out of music and dance activities, compounding their difficulty. Finally, there are beat ‘experts’, such as jazz drummers, who have honed their accuracy with hours of practice. Regardless of how good one is at feeling the beat, however, moving to music is a universal part of human behavior.

You might ask, why are some people ‘beat deaf’ but not others? There some research, but not as much as us scientists would like! There may well be different types of beat-deafness, caused by difficulties in sound processing or putting sounds together into sequences, or by difficulties in coordination. One theory is that the coupling of movements to sound in the brain goes wrong, and the neural links between sound inputs and motor outputs may be weaker in individuals with beat-deafness.

–Dr. Jessica Grahn, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Western University