This is your brain on music

The only prerequisite tool for creating music is the human body — a fact that makes it difficult to trace the phenomenon’s origins. Most scholars agree that music has been with us since prehistoric times; it has served as a chronicle of family history, a declaration of revolutionary ideals, a call-to-arms and an expression of cultural identity. In some contexts, music has the ability to spark mass excitement, while in others it can be misused as an insidious method of psychological torture.

The idea that music has a profound influence on our internal life is as old as academia itself. In Plato’s “Republic,” the ancient Greek philosopher wrote that “education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace.” Although this idea that music influences our psychology seems intuitive, the neural underpinnings of that process are both complex and opaque.

Neuroscientists have identified a multitude of areas in the brain that are involved in listening to, performing and interpreting music. But the research is less clear on how these individual elements are connected. Mark Reybrouck, a professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Leuven, believes that a better understanding of how the brain responds to music will come from the field of “connectomics.” This newer, neuroscientific approach attempts to understand brain networks by analyzing the massive datasets that result from high-resolution brain imaging.

“This is just the beginning. You have a lot of articles finding different things but not yet converging in the same direction,” Reybrouck says. “I think that, in ten years, we will have a very coherent idea of what is going on in your brain when you listen to music.”

Though scientists may still be groping around in the proverbial darkness, a few have uncovered pieces of the puzzle.

In the spring and summer of 2020, people around the world retreated into the relative safety of their homes as the Covid-19 pandemic crept from country to country. And as social isolation inevitably set in, people turned to home entertainment — not just to stave off boredom, but also to feel connected with the outside world.

A 2020 survey of thousands of Americans and Europeans revealed that they often turned to music as a way to cope with the stress of the pandemic. And, although the study was purely correlational, the results suggest that it may have helped. Respondents who spent more hours listening to music during the pandemic tended to have decreased symptoms of depression.

Neurologically, the pleasure of listening to music has its roots in the same system that lights up when you eat chocolate cake. When you hear a good song, connections abound between the parts of your brain that process sound and the nucleus accumbens, which is part of the “reward center” of the brain.

“You have the vibration of the music imprinting on your senses, body and the brain,” Reybrouck says. “Then your brain triggers the release of pleasure-related hormones.”

Even without lyrics for context, the tonality and tempo of music can convey basic emotions. And, according to a 2012 paper by a group of Duke-National University of Singapore scientists, these emotional flavors transcend cultural boundaries. The tonal characteristics of sad and happy music across a diversity of traditions (from classical South Indian music to Western music) have a common origin in the speech patterns of someone who is experiencing those emotions.

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