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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

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