The brain can work in ways we can’t comprehend. In
numerous studies they have been able to see just how much normal things like
music can effect, and even alter, it completely. These facts about music will
give you an insight into the complexity of your own mind.
1.The chills you get when you
listen to music, is mostly caused by the brain releasing
dopamine while anticipating the peak moment of a song.
Dopamine is a feel-good chemical
released by the brain. This chemical is directly involved in motivation, as
well as addiction. These studies found a biological explanation for
why music always has been such a huge part of emotional
events around the world since the beginning of human history.
2.Music that gives you chills might make you
more generous too.
Research published
last year in the journal Frontiers In
Psychology found that people were more likely to choose to give money to others if
their favorite chill-inducing was playing. If music that they said they didn’t
like was playing instead, they gave significantly less money. Just 22 people took part, so take the
results with a pinch of salt, but it’s an intriguing finding.
3.Listening to sad music provokes more
nostalgia than sadness.
A study published last year in PLOS One looked into why people seek out and
actually like listening to sad music.
People in the study reported that
sad music brought up “a wide range of complex and partially positive emotions,
such as nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder,” write the study authors.
Surprisingly, nostalgia, rather
than sadness, was the most frequently reported emotion.
4.There are few
activities in life that utilizes the entire brain and music is one of them.
With Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (FMRI), a research team recorded a group of individuals who were
listening to music. They found that listening to music recruits the
auditory areas, and employs large-scale neural networks in the brain. In
fact, they believe music can activate emotional, motor, and creative
areas of the brain.
5.Cows produce more milk when listening to
relaxing music.
As reported by the BBC in 2001,
listening to relaxing music can lead to cows producing more milk. The study involved 1,000 cows being exposed to
fast, slow, or no music for 12 hours a day over a nine-week period.
When listening
to the slow music (e.g. “Everybody Hurts” by REM) the cows produced 3% more
milk per day than when they listened to fast music (e.g. “Space Cowboy” by
Jamiroquai).
“Calming music can improve milk
yield, probably because it reduces stress,” Dr Adrian North, who carried out
the study, told the BBC.
According to Modern Farmer, music
is something the dairy industry had been playing about with before the
psychologists got involved too. Dairy farmer Kristine Spadgenske from Minnesota told them: “At our farm
you can always tell when the radio is not on because the cows are way more
jumpy and less likely to come into the parlor.”
6.Repetitive choruses are the key to a hit
song.
Joseph Nunes at the University of South Carolina looked
into what makes a song commercially successful in a paper published last year in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
“Once you got on the hot 100, the
more you repeated the chorus, the more word repetition, the less complex the
song, the better it did,” Nunes told NPR earlier this year.
In fact, for each extra repetition
of the chorus “a song’’s likelihood of making it to Number One, as opposed to
staying at the bottom of the Billboard chart, increases by 14.5 percent,” Nunes
and his co-authors wrote. There is a limit, though. Nunes and his colleagues
saw a “ceiling affect”, above which more repetitions harmed, instead of helped,
a song’s chances.
7.Playing music regularly
will physically alter your brain structure.
Brain plasticity refers to the
brain’s ability to change throughout life. Changes associated
with learning occur mostly at the connections between neurons. When
studying musicians, they found that the cortex volume was highest in
professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and
lowest in non-musicians.
8.The brain responds to
music the same way it responds to something that you eat.
As stated above, dopamine is a chemical released by the brain. This chemical is connected with the feeling of euphoria which is associated with addiction, sex, and even eating. Dopamine is what enables a person to feel the pleasures of such things. A study using only instrumental music proves that anticipation for a musical rush released the same kind of reactions in the brain as anticipating the taste of your food.
9.The “mere exposure effect” makes us like
certain music just because we hear it a lot.
But, crucially, there’s a point at which it then really really starts to grate – and you get an
inverted-U graph like the one above.
In an essay at Aeon, Elizabeth
Hellmuth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of
Arkansas, explains why repetition makes us like music: “People seem to
misattribute their increased perceptual fluency – their improved ability to
process the triangle or the picture or the melody – not to the prior
experience, but to some quality of the object itself.”
Basically, hearing a song you’ve
heard before makes you feel clever, because your brain has already figured it
out.
10.Listening to music
while exercising can significantly improve your work-out performance.
Dissociation is a diversionary
technique which lowered the perceptions of effort. This technique can divert
the mind from feelings of fatigue, and heighten positive mood states like
vigor. By using music during low to moderate exercise intensities,
you will find yourself with an overall more pleasurable experience while
working out.
11.An emotional attachment
could be the reason for your favorite song choice.
Favorite songs are often
context-dependent. Even though many people often change their favorite song
depending on the most recent releases, it is proven that long-lasting
preferences are due mainly to an emotional attachment to a memory associated
with the song.
12.Your heartbeat
changes to mimics the music you listen to.
Music is found to modulate heart rate,
blood pressure, and respiration. The cardiovascular system mirrored
deflating decrescendos, and swelling crescendos in a study of 24
volunteers. Distinguishing changes in sound patterns were even found to be
equipped in those as small as a developing fetus.
13. Listening to happy vs.
sad music can affect the way you perceive the world around you.
The brain always compares the
information that comes through the eyes with what it expects about the
world, based on what you know. The final results in our mind are what we
perceive as our reality. Therefore, happy songs that lift your
spirits make you see the world around you differently than that of a
sad person.
14. An “ear worm” is a song
that you can’t seem to get out of your head.
An ear worm is a cognitive itch in your
brain. This “brain itch” is a need for the brain to fill in the
gaps in a song’s rhythm. The auditory cortex is a part of your brain that
will automatically fill in a rhythm of a song. In other words, your
brain kept “singing” long after the song had ended.
15.Music triggers
activity in the same part of the brain that releases Dopamine, the “pleasure
chemical”.
The nucleus accumbens is a part of your
brain that releases Dopamine during eating, and sex. The most interesting part
is that the nucleus accumbens is just a small part of the brain that gets affected by
music. It also affects the amygdala, which is the part of the brain used to
process emotion for music
16.Music is often
prescribed to patients with Parkinson’s disease and stroke victims.
Music therapy has been around for
decades. Music triggers networks of neurons into organized movement. The
part of the brain the processes movement also overlaps speech networks. These
two key elements help patients overcome the obstacles that most effect
them such as basic motor skills, and speech difficulties.
17.According to a study,
Learning a musical instrument can improve fine motor and
reasoning skills.
In a study of
children, it revealed that those with three or more years of musical
training preformed better in fine motor skills and auditory discrimination
abilities then those who had none. They even tested better for vocabulary
and reasoning skills, even though those are quite separate from music
training.
