How The Brain Translates Money Into Force

Story highlights

• Music was shown to lower anxiety more than medications in one written report
• Encephalon activation patterns are related to how much people like item songs
• Consequent activity patterns are seen when different people listen to the aforementioned music

(CNN)Whether you are rocking out to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in your car or reading with Bach in your bedroom, music has a special power to pump us up or calm us downwards.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what'southward going on in our brains when nosotros heed to music and how it produces such stiff effects on the psyche.

"We're using music to meliorate understand brain function in general," said Daniel Levitin, a prominent psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal.

3 studies published this month explore how the encephalon responds to music. The quest to dissect exactly what chemical processes occur when we put our headphones on is far from over, merely scientists take come across some clues.

Health benefits of music

Listening to music feels good, but tin can that interpret into physiological benefit? Levitin and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 400 studies in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, suggesting the answer is yeah.

In 1 study reviewed, researchers studied patients who were about to undergo surgery. Participants were randomly assigned to either mind to music or have anti-feet drugs. Scientists tracked patient's ratings of their own anxiety, as well as the levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

The results: The patients who listened to music had less feet and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is simply i study, and more inquiry needs to be done to confirm the results, merely information technology points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.

"The promise here is that music is arguably less expensive than drugs, and it's easier on the torso and it doesn't take side furnishings," Levitin said.

Levitin and colleagues as well highlighted evidence that music is associated with immunoglobin A, an antibody linked to immunity, equally well as college counts of cells that fight germs and bacteria.

What music nosotros like

Then music is good for us, but how do nosotros judge what music is pleasurable? A study published in the journal Scientific discipline suggests that patterns of brain activity can indicate whether a person likes what he or she is hearing.

Valorie Salimpoor, a researcher at the Rotman Enquiry Establish in Toronto and former Levitin student, led a study in which participants listened to 60 excerpts of music they had never heard before while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The 19 participants were asked to indicate how much money they would spend on a given vocal when listening to the excerpts, while also allowing researchers to analyze patterns of brain activity through the fMRI. Such a pocket-size number of participants is mutual in an fMRI written report for reasons of complication and cost, although it suggests more inquiry should be done.

The study authors highlight in their results a brain expanse called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in forming expectations.

"There is actually a network of activity that predicts whether or not you're going to purchase this music as you're listening to the music," Salimpoor said.

The more action in the nucleus accumbens, the more than coin people said they were willing to spend on whatsoever item vocal in the "auction" ready-upwards that the researchers designed.

"This was an indicator that some sort of reward-related expectations were met or surpassed," she said.

Another encephalon area called the superior temporal gyrus is intimately involved in the experience of music, and its connectedness to the nucleus accumbens is of import, she said. The genres of music that a person listens to over a lifetime impact how the superior temporal gyrus is formed.

The superior temporal gyrus lone doesn't predict whether a person likes a given piece of music, only it's involved in storing templates from what yous've heard before. For example, a person who has heard a lot of jazz before is more than likely to appreciate a given piece of jazz music than someone with a lot less experience.

"The encephalon kind of works like a music recommendation arrangement," Salimpoor said.

Levitin called the findings "interesting," but views it as a refinement of what other laboratories have found in the by. He and Vinod Menon at Stanford University were the first to bear witness the part of the nucleus accumbens in music in 2005.

Are nosotros all hearing the same thing?

Information technology seems intuitive that different people, based on their personalities, preferences and personal histories of listening to particular music, will have dissimilar experiences when exposed to a item slice of music. Their attention to various details will vary and they might like dissimilar things about it.

But Levitin and his collaborators showed in a European Journal of Neuroscience study that, from the perspective of the brain, there may exist more similarities among music listeners than you lot think.

"Despite our idiosyncrasies in listening, the brain experiences music in a very consequent way across subjects," said Daniel Abrams, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Seventeen participants who had piddling or no music training took office in this report which, like Salimpoor'due south, is minor, but typical for an fMRI written report. Participants listened to iv symphonies by composer William Boyce of the tardily Baroque catamenia, which the researchers chose because they reflect Western music just were likely to be unfamiliar to subjects.

Amid participants, the researchers found synchronization in several key brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in dissimilar people who listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants not only perceive the music the same way, but, despite whatever personal differences they brought to the table, there's a level on which they share a mutual experience.

Brain regions involved in motion, attending, planning and memory consistently showed activation when participants listened to music -- these are structures that don't accept to do with auditory processing itself. This means that when we experience of music, a lot of other things are going on beyond merely processing sound, Abrams said.

1 resulting theory is that these brain areas are involved in holding particular parts of a song, such every bit the melody, in the listen while the residue of the slice of music plays on, Abrams said.

The results likewise reflect the power of music to unite people, Levitin said.

"It'south non our natural tendency to thrust ourselves into a oversupply of xx,000 people, but for a Muse concert or a Radiohead concert we'll practise it," Levitin said. "There'southward this unifying force that comes from the music, and we don't go that from other things."

Further research might compare how individuals with healthy brains differ in their musical listening compared to people with autism or other brain disorders, Abrams said.

"The methods that we've used can be applied to empathize how the brain tracks auditory data over time," Abrams said.

What's adjacent

The side by side borderland in the neuroscience of music is to look more carefully at which chemicals in the brain are involved in music listening and performing, Levitin said, and in which parts of the brain are they active.

Any given neurochemical can take different part depending on its surface area of the brain, he said. For instance, dopamine helps increase attention in the frontal lobes, but in the limbic system it is associated with pleasance.

Past using music as a window into the function of a salubrious brain, researchers may gain insights into a slew of neurological and psychiatric problems, he said.

"Knowing meliorate how the encephalon is organized, how it functions, what chemic messengers are working and how they're working -- that will let u.s.a. to formulate treatments for people with encephalon injury, or to combat diseases or disorders or fifty-fifty psychiatric problems," Levitin said.

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Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/15/health/brain-music-research/

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