Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Listening To Music

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.