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Why does music make us feel certain emotions? 

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Why does music make us feel certain emotions? 

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Will we ever 'grow out' of the music we loved as teenagers?

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As we still obsess over Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus - the artists we adored as teenagers - we ask if our music tastes ever really evolve.

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Why are we so nostalgic for music we loved as teenagers? 

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Why are we so nostalgic for music we loved as teenagers? 

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As I plod through my 20s, I've noticed a strange phenomenon: The music I loved as a teenager means more to me than ever-but with each passing year, the new songs on the radio sound like noisy nonsense. On an objective level, I know this makes no sense. I cannot seriously assert that Ludacris' " Rollout" is artistically superior to Katy Perry's " Roar," yet I treasure every second of the former and reject the latter as yelping pablum. If I listen to the Top 10 hits of 2013, I get a headache. If I listen to the Top 10 hits of 2003, I get happy.

Why do the songs I heard when I was teenager sound sweeter than anything I listen to as an adult? I'm happy to report that my own failures of discernment as a music critic may not be entirely to blame. In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have confirmed that these songs hold disproportionate power over our emotions. And researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we'll hear as adults-a connection that doesn't weaken as we age. Musical nostalgia, in other words, isn't just a cultural phenomenon: It's a neuronic command. And no matter how sophisticated our tastes might otherwise grow to be, our brains may stay jammed on those songs we obsessed over during the high drama of adolescence.

To understand why we grow attached to certain songs, it helps to start with the brain's relationship with music in general. When we first hear a song, it stimulates our auditory cortex and we convert the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies into a coherent whole. From there, our reaction to music depends on how we interact with it. Sing along to a song in your head, and you'll activate your premotor cortex, which helps plan and coordinate movements. Dance along, and your neurons will synchronize with the beat of the music. Pay close attention to the lyrics and instrumentation, and you'll activate your parietal cortex, which helps you shift and maintain attention to different stimuli. Listen to a song that triggers personal memories, and your prefrontal cortex, which maintains information relevant to your personal life and relationships, will spring into action.

But memories are meaningless without emotion-and aside from love and drugs, nothing spurs an emotional reaction like music. Brain imaging studies show that our favorite songs stimulate the brain's pleasure circuit, which releases an influx of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other neurochemicals that make us feel good. The more we like a song, the more we get treated to neurochemical bliss, flooding our brains with some of the same neurotransmitters that cocaine chases after.

Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody. But in young people, the spark turns into a fireworks show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development-and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important-especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams (and embarrassments).

On its own, these neurological pyrotechnics would be enough to imprint certain songs into our brain. But there are other elements at work that lock the last song played at your eighth-grade dance into your memory pretty much forever. Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, notes that the music of our teenage years is fundamentally intertwined with our social lives.

"We are discovering music on our own for the first time when we're young," he told me, "often through our friends. We listen to the music they listen to as a badge, as a way of belonging to a certain social group. That melds the music to our sense of identity."

Petr Janata, a psychologist at University of California-Davis, agrees with the sociality theory, explaining that our favorite music "gets consolidated into the especially emotional memories from our formative years." He adds that there may be another factor in play: the reminiscence bump, a name for the phenomenon that we remember so much of our younger adult lives more vividly than other years, and these memories last well into our senescence. According to the reminiscence bump theory, we all have a culturally conditioned "life script" that serves, in our memory, as the narrative of our lives. When we look back on our pasts, the memories that dominate this narrative have two things in common: They're happy, and they cluster around our teens and early 20s.

Why are our memories from these years so vibrant and enduring? Researchers at the University of Leeds proposed one enticing explanation in 2008: The years highlighted by the reminiscence bump coincide with "the emergence of a stable and enduring self." The period between 12 and 22, in other words, is the time when you become you. It makes sense, then, that the memories that contribute to this process become uncommonly important throughout the rest of your life. They didn't just contribute to the development of your self-image; they became part of your self-image-an integral part of your sense of self.

Music plays two roles in this process. First, some songs become memories in and of themselves, so forcefully do they worm their way into memory. Many of us can vividly remember the first time we heard that one Beatles (or Backstreet Boys) song that, decades later, we still sing at every karaoke night. Second, these songs form the soundtrack to what feel, at the time, like the most vital and momentous years of our lives. The music that plays during our first kiss, our first prom, our first toke, gets attached to that memory and takes on a glimmer of its profundity. We may recognize in retrospect that prom wasn't really all that profound. But even as the importance of the memory itself fades, the emotional afterglow tagged to the music lingers.

As fun as these theories may be, their logical conclusion-you'll never love another song the way you loved the music of your youth-is a little depressing. It's not all bad news, of course: Our adult tastes aren't really weaker; they're just more mature, allowing us to appreciate complex aesthetic beauty on an intellectual level. No matter how adult we may become, however, music remains an escape hatch from our adult brains back into the raw, unalloyed passion of our youths. The nostalgia that accompanies our favorite songs isn't just a fleeting recollection of earlier times; it's a neurological wormhole that gives us a glimpse into the years when our brains leapt with joy at the music that's come to define us. Those years may have passed. But each time we hear the songs we loved, the joy they once brought surges anew.

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Why Are We So Nostalgic for Music We Loved as Teenagers?

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As I plod through my 20s, I've noticed a strange phenomenon: The music I loved as a teenager means more to me than ever-but with each passing year, the...

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How does music affect your mood and emotions? 

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How does music affect your mood and emotions? 

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How Does Music Affect Your Mood and Emotions

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New research shows that even sad music can lift your mood, while other studies suggest music can boost happiness and reduce anxiety.

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Indre Viskontas is an opera singer and a neuroscientist. She's professor of sciences and humanities at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, assistant professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, and the creative director of Pasadena Opera. (Some people just get more done with their days.) Her new book is titled: "How Music Can Make You Better."

She describes the book as a field guide for how music works and how it affects our brains and bodies - and how it can affect society.

Many people think sound and music exist independently of us, but that's not so. Sound occurs only when apprehended by an ear. Therein lies the answer to the strange question: If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Viskontas says no. "Because the sound is not in the sound waves. It's in how the brain turns that information, these factions and compressions of air, into something that we can interpret as a perception, which is how we hear."

This is why people's taste in music can vary greatly. It's also why figuring out what music you love best is critical to tapping into the healing power of sound. When music is meaningful to you, there are many ways in which it can be used to change the body physiologically.

"We can see that people who are about to go in for surgery, for example, if they listened to music that they like, we actually can track the way their body's physiology shows that they are relaxing," she said. "Their heart rate decreases, they have less anxiety, but it has to be music that calms that particular person. So a lot of people find instrumental or classical music calming, but not everyone."

Music involves complex systems all over the brain, and can repair damaged areas. People who have damaged the left frontal part of their brain lose the ability to speak.

Melodic intonation therapy is a specific type of therapy that combines spoken word with melody. It allows people to bridge speaking with singing.

Let's say a person wants to ask where the bathroom is but just can't get the words out, which happens when the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged. Oftentimes the patient can learn to sing the words before regaining the ability to say them. A great example is former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords' relearning how to speak using music. When she couldn't say the word "light," her speech therapist started to sing "This Little Light of Mine," and Giffords was able to sing along with her.

It's well-recorded that Alzheimer's patients often retain the ability to appreciate, understand and even connect through music. That's because our relationship with music involves many different parts of the brain. It's likely that some regions and networks are intact, and can bypass the parts of the brain that are degenerating. And that can help us synchronize some of the activity in our brains and help us feel more connected.

"And to me, that's really the power of music in patients with Alzheimer's disease," Viskontas said. "It's this feeling that you can connect with them. You can get access to their humanity through music."

Viskontas says we can all access our humanity through music.

"Music is really strong social glue," she said. "We see levels of oxytocin, which is the attachment hormone, increase when people are making music together. I think a lot of people are missing out on the power of music by not trying to make it themselves. And part of that is because we have now this culture of ... having to be perfect, having to be really great, not wanting to embarrass yourself by making a silly sound. I hope that with a lot of these music-making tools now that are available, I hope that that will encourage more people to participate in music making and not just be passive listeners."

Viskontas encourages us to use music to design a better life. Music can catalyze emotions we're interested in cultivating. It can sharpen our minds, bestow energy and relieve stress. Music can heal us.

"For me, a beautiful world would be one in which everybody feels that they are meaningful participants in society, that they add something that is important, and that they can feel connected to others and the rest of the world," she said.

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A Beautiful World: How music can make you better

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Yes, music can help Alzheimer's patients; but it can help the rest of us, too.

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(Inside Science) -- From a simple, lonely melody to an intricate sonata, sometimes it feels like music can speak directly to your heart, in a language that you don't know, but your emotions understand.

And that's because music is a language. The language of emotion. And I mean that literally. Music has structure, progression and syntax -- just like language. The brain even processes musical syntax using the same area it uses to process language syntax. Next time you hear someone speaking emotionally, listen to the acoustic characteristics of their voice -- they'll mirror music of the same emotion: fast, loud and high for excitement and happiness, slower and softer for melancholy.

So if music is a language, how does it convey its meaning? After all, it doesn't have any words, does it? At the very basic, physical level, loud and fast noises excite us more than slow quiet ones because our brain-stem is tuned to attend to these kinds of noises in the environment. Certain chords sound pleasant because of how we divide tones into different pitches: harmonically simple, consonant chords, like majors, are easy to do this for, but harmonically complex chords, like tritones, are harder to distinguish and so we find them dissonant. But these automatic brain mechanisms are only the beginning of how we read meaning into music.

Much of the emotional significance that we find in music comes from our own life experience: whilst still in the cradle we learn to associate the music we hear with the emotional environment we hear it in -- so a mother's lullaby might imprint us with calm memories for major keys, whilst a lovers' lament in A minor would remind us of breakups and ex-girlfriends. Although it wasn't always this way around: After all, western cultures have a very different appreciation of dissonance to Arabic music, or to Indian ragas.

But we don't just sense the emotions in music; we feel those emotions too. How? How can it force us to actually feel the same way? One possibility is that once we've understood what the emotional content of the music is, it activates a population of brain cells called mirror neurons. These cells mentally simulate behaviors that we perceive in the world around us, which helps us with social understanding and empathy. In this case they allow us to empathize with the emotion of the music, triggering the same emotions in us by activating the limbic system -- the emotion hub of the brain.

Another theory has it that the beat of rhythms, and the frequency of soundwaves, actually drive the intrinsic oscillations of neurons in the brain. Different groups of neurons synchronize their firing at different rates - some slower, around one to five times a second, others closer to 20 times a second - and different rates are associated with different mood states. Through auditory stimulation, music could drive neurons to fire at a specific rate -- as though our brains are resonating to a beat -- that sets our overall mood.

But some of our most powerful responses to music come from expectation, tension, then resolution. But calculating something that complex requires much more of our brain's vast processing power. Humans are expert predictors -- we are always trying to figure what's going to happen next and why. As we listen to music, our brains are continuously trying to guess what's coming up, based on what we've just heard and on our experience of music over our lives. You can even see the moment we've realized the meaning in the music by a spike in the recorded electrical activity across the brain.

To make simpler harmonic and melodic predictions, we use our auditory cortex. But for more abstract syntactic and structural changes, we use the frontal lobes. These areas are heavily interconnected with the limbic system as well -- which both aids in processing the music, and adds emotional texture as information loops back and forth between the regions, with the ebb and flow of the piece.

Using these circuits, our brains try to calculate what's coming next, and to judge the accuracy of those predictions we use the brain's reward system -- dopamine. A correct guess gets a little pleasurable puff of dopamine, an incorrect guess gets nothing, and an unexpected, pleasurable resolution gets a great big burst! You know the thrill you get at a particularly beautiful musical moment? That chill that runs across your skin? You can predict when you'll feel that from a rush of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens -- a key node in the reward system. The nucleus accumbens then triggers the physical response that you feel, by activating the autonomic nervous system.

So why did we become the musical species? No other animal does this. This is an evolutionary question that flummoxed Darwin and is still argued about today. It might be a great and lucky accident -- a happy quirk of our brain's development that it can appreciate this complex integration of sound waves. Or maybe there is something more. Music is exceptionally good at provoking emotion -- far more than language. People with autism can have great problems perceiving emotion, but can have their limbic systems activated through music. Communication of our emotional worlds, through music, could be as important for social cohesion as communication about the physical world is through language. It has been suggested that before music and before language, there was one mixture of the two -- musilanguage -- that sounded across the savannah. That musilanguage split and specialized into two different forms of communication - one for ideas, one for emotion. Whatever the reason is, our ancestors have been playing music for longer than any of us knew -- recently a bone flute was found near the Danube in Germany, from over 40,000 years ago. Music is in our blood, our bones and our brains.

Credit: Alexander Soares, concert pianist

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(Inside Science) -- From a simple, lonely melody to an intricate sonata, sometimes it feels like music can speak directly to your heart, in a language that you don't know, but your emotions understand.

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Can music improve athletic performance? Can running faster or working out harder be as simple as boosting the volume on your favorite songs?

Costas Karageorghis, author of the book, "Applying Music in Exercise and Sport" has spent 25 years studying music and its effect on the brain. Music can be a stimulant or a sedative, he said. It can enhance mood, improve muscle control and help the brain build key muscle memories. Here's how:
It uses the whole brain
"When the brain is listening to music, it lights up like a Christmas tree," Karageorghis said. "It's an ideal stimuli because it reaches [parts of the brain] that can't easily be reached."

Listening to music activates several major brain areas at once, his research shows: the parietal lobe, which contains the motor cortex; the occipital, or visual processing lobe, the brain's center for rhythm and coordination; the temporal lobe, which regulates pitch, tone and structure; and the frontal lobe and cerebellum, which regulate emotion.

These brain areas are critical to athletic performance. It is in the temporal lobe that cortisol - a stress hormone - is released. Music helps regulate stress by reducing cortisol levels, Karageorghis said. The motor cortex, which is located in the parietal lobe, regulates our body's motor function, which helps determine how straight we throw a football or how well we coordinate our limbs when running, and allows us to fall into our own "rhythm" as we work.

Reyna Gordon, a neuroscientist with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, says it's unusual for so many parts of the brain to act in concert.
It helps regulate your emotions
Karageorghis' research has focused on how music regulates mood and helps us filter out distractions. The key, he found, is to use music to tap into the brain's secretion of dopamine and natural opioids - two naturally occurring chemicals that help block our perception of fatigue and pain.

Music can also enhance mood and increase confidence, he said.

"Based on my research, music can be like a performance-enhancing drug. It's just that intoxicating."

For example, listening to Beyonce's "Run the World" might send a positive message to the brain about performance, which might in turn boosts confidence. Conversely, the sad message in Pink's "Sober" can help curb excess adrenaline and bring our anxiety levels back to neutral, post-workout or competition.

Nathan Keith Schrimsher, a 2016 Olympian competing for team USA in the modern pentathlon competition, listened to "One Day Too Late" during his last competition.

"It just put me into an attitude to not quit and to give everything I have to make my life matter," he said.

Gordon's research shows that music can also have a lasting effect on our emotions. When she exposed test subjects to sad music and then showed them a face expressing a certain emotion, the subjects were more likely to assume the face was frowning.

"Our brains want to make sense of the info coming in," Gordon said. "People are able to recognize emotion in music from very short excerpts."
It Makes You Want to Move
Karageorghis' findings show that syncing the tempo of the music to an athlete's heart rate can have powerful outcomes, such as improved stamina, speed and athletic performance .

"You want to try to match your music tempo to your desire to work," Karageorghis said. "That doesn't mean just increasing the tempo, however, because there is a ceiling effect. Anything over 140 beats per minute won't make you go any faster."

The sweet spot, he said, is around 120 bpm, which is the average heart rate during a light jog.

Using this information, Karageorghis has crafted playlists that match heart rates from resting (around 50 bpm) through a warm-up (80 bpm) to low intensity (100-120 bpm) to mid-intensity (120-130 bpm) and finally to maximum (140 bpm) before reversing the process.

KARAGEORGHIS RUNNER'S PLAYLIST

Jessica Grahn, a cognitive neuroscientist at Western University in London, Ontario, said the body responds best to steady rhythms. She found that among patients with Parkinson's Disease, for example, having a steady beat that matches their movements seemed to improve muscle control.
It Helps with Muscle Memory
Finally, listening to songs with lyrics that mimic physical movement, Karageorghis said, can help an athlete's brain form muscle memories. The Salt n' Pepper song "Push it", she said, is the perfect song for those practicing shot put, or any exercise that requires the athlete to physically push something. The brain forms pathways more effectively when it has a song to back up the physical goal.

"Based on my research, music can be like a performance-enhancing drug," Karageorghis said. "It's just that intoxicating."
What are your Olympians Listening To? -Carli Lloyd, indoor volleyball, setter "Music can help get me out of my own head and in my zone. It can make me relax, or pump me up. Music plays a huge role in my competition routine." TOP SONGS:
Not Afraid-Eminem -

There Will Be Time-Mumford and Sons-

Broken Arrows-Avicii-
-Margaux Isaksen, modern pentathlon "I'll occasionally listen to music during fencing in competition but I'm past the point where music or anything will change my performance to help me. I just go out there and do the best I can, that's all I can ask for." TOP SONGS:
Pill in Ibiza-Mike Posner-

Operate-Illenium remix-

I Want You to Know-Zedd-
-Katie Zaferes, Triathlon "Music is there to calm me down or pump me up. It fills my brain and blocks any unnecessary thoughts." TOP SONGS:
Straight Out The Gate- Tech N9ne-

Let's Go-Trick Daddy-

My House-Flo Rida-

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Can music improve athletic performance? Can running faster or working out harder be as simple as boosting the volume on your favorite songs? Costas Karageorghis, author of the book, "Applying Music in Exercise and Sport" has spent 25 years studying music and its effect on the brain.

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Does listening to sad music make you happier? 

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Does listening to sad music make you happier? 

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https://www.classical-music.com/articles/does-listening-sad-music-actually-make-you-happier

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Does listening to sad music actually make you happier?

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Research suggests that sad music actually makes people feel more positive

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A recent research study suggests that learning music doesn't make you smarter. For parents who have been encouraging their children to take music lessons, this could be a disconcerting message, but it may not be as bad as you think. We already knew that music doesn't make you more intelligent, or suddenly good at taking tests in other subjects, and that's really all this study confirms.

A new study suggests that music lessons do not increase children's intelligence. But there are still ... [+]
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First, it's important to know that this isn't based on new research, but is an analysis of existing studies. The authors of the study, Giovanni Sala (Fujita Health University) and Fernand Gobet (London School of Economics) did a systematic analysis of several studies that all looked at the effect of music on measures of intelligence or academic achievement. They looked at how music lessons affected students' scores on memory tests, for example, or on tests that measured their reasoning skills, literacy skills or ability to solve mathematics problems.

The researchers chose a set of strict criteria to select these studies, so that they would be able to compare similar types of experiments between papers. For example, they only compared studies that had randomly assigned students to either receive music lessons or not, and ignored studies on existing music classes (without a non-music control). After a careful analysis of the combined findings of 54 carefully selected studies, Sala and Gobet concluded that on the whole, students who received music education did not automatically score better on tests that measured their intelligence or academic ability.

Is this something to worry about? That depends partly on what you believe the purpose of music lessons is. If you believe music is valuable as a creative skill, or an enriching social activity, then this research won't affect you much. It's only a concern if you think music is a way to increase intelligence - but this isn't the first time that the link between music and intelligence has been disproven.

For a while, there was an idea floating around the internet and various magazines that suggested that babies could become smarter if they listened to Mozart, or to other classical music. Inspired, some parents bought classical CDs for their babies in the hopes that this would boost their intelligence. But this so-called "Mozart Effect" has been debunked several times. Listening to classical music is not making children any more intelligent.

But surely taking music lessons is different from just listening to music? Wouldn't taking lessons make kids smarter? That's exactly the question that many researchers over the years have tried to answer. Some of their studies concluded that it does, and some found that it doesn't. For example, one study showed that music education did not improve reading skills, while another one found a small effect of music on young children's ability to manipulate syllables and words. Sala and Gobet looked at the data behind these studies and 52 others, and after carefully comparing the data from different papers, they concluded that children who were assigned music lessons did not score higher on tests that measure their intelligence or academic ability than kids that didn't learn music.

If music doesn't make you smarter, how does that explain other research that show that music lessons help students' school performance? For example, last year a large study from Canada found that high school students did better in math, science and English classes if they also took music lessons.

That study was not one of the ones included in this new meta-analysis, because it hadn't randomly assigned students to attend music classes or not. That means that there could have been other factors, besides music, that determined how well the students did in their classes. For example, perhaps the students who already did well in school were more likely to be the ones who were encouraged to take music, while those struggling were advised to focus on other subjects. Or the students who took music lessons were from wealthier families, more likely to invest in music activities beyond the school curriculum. But as I mentioned when I covered this Canadian study last year, the authors took all of that into account and still found that kids who had taken music lessons fared better in other classes.

At first glance, that sounds very different from what this new study by Sala and Gobet found. How can it be possible for music lessons to have no effect on intelligence, and still lead to kids doing better in school?

It seems like there is something about music lessons that makes students able to perform better in their other classes. That doesn't have to be intelligence, and it's likely not. If intelligence was the main factor behind school performance, every student would always do equally well in their classes. But they don't. Grades go up and down over the years so there must be other factors besides intelligence or the ability to take a test that could affect how well someone does in school. Music lessons could have helped in different ways: They could have led to a change in homework habits, they could have increased confidence, or they could have improved social skills.

Sala and Gobet's analysis only looked at measures of intelligence and performance on particular tests, not at any of the other possible factors that would lead a student to do better in class. The authors even mention this in their paper. They say "music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children, such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem".

And finally, they also mention that music education could still be very beneficial to students' performance in non-music subjects if the music is integrated into these classes. For example, if music is used in a math lesson or a science lesson, that could help make the material more memorable. But again, this was not something they looked at in the new paper.

So feel free to keep making music, and keep encouraging children to learn music.

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Making Music May Not Make You Smarter, But Can Still Be Helpful For Education

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A new study suggests that music lessons do not increase children's intelligence. But there are still other reasons why music lessons can be valuable for education.

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Like many music lovers I've always had a fascination withthe emotional power. How can a combination of sounds make all the hairs on your arms stand on end, or make you cry? I've always enjoyed reading newspaper and magazine articles about the psychological effects of music, but apart from the general conclusion that "music is magical", they rarely provide any scientific answers.

But there are answers as to why music has such power over us. Since the middle of the 20th century, music psychologists have been carrying out a wide range of fascinating research into how our brains and bodies respond to music - but most of this has been relayed to us in formal scientific language, so I thought it would be a good idea to gather together the most interesting facts and theories from this large body of work and present them in plain language for the general reader.

I spent four years gathering information for my book, Why We Love Music, reading textbooks and papers packed full with phrases like "spectral structure and harmonic syntax" and "amplitudes of transglottal airflow". Translated into conversational English, the science - I think - is of interest to everyone who loves music (and even those few of us who don't). For example, experiments have demonstrated that music is extremely effective at curing insomnia; that shoppers spend more money in stores playing classical music; and that communal singing helps humans to bond with each other by releasing oxytocin into our system - the same chemical we experience during sex or breast-feeding.

My main problem in preparing the book was deciding which subjects to leave out. There are lots of interesting snippets I wish I could have included but they simply didn't fit into any of the chapters, like how rock singers only appear to be singing louder when they reach the climax of their songs. What they are actually doing is putting more emotional stress into their voices, which we pay more attention to and so they sound louder than they are.

The effect of music on our body chemistry is particularly fascinating to me. Our bodies effectively contain an internal pharmacy that dispenses various chemicals to help us deal with life's challenges. For example, if you're in a dangerous situation, you'll receive a shot of adrenaline to give you energy, and if you do something which is good for you, you get a dose of serotonin (which encourages you to do the same thing again). Research has revealed that music holds the keys to your body's pharmacy, and can promote or suppress the release of these chemicals. For example, loud and rhythmic music can increase your adrenaline levels, which will help to keep you awake during a long, boring drive. But in the case of insomnia, relaxing music can help you drop off to sleep by reducing the amount of the 'vigilance chemical' Noradrenaline in your system. Just half an hour of calming classical music at bedtime can help you to re-establish a healthy sleep pattern - I'd suggest lute music, like Nigel North's Cantabile. On that note, sweet dreams!

Extract

Professors North and Hargreaves put music speakers on the top shelf of an end-of-aisle wine display in a supermarket to see if different sorts of music could influence the choices we make. The display consisted of four shelves, each of which had a French wine on one side and a German wine on the other. The wines on each shelf were matched for price and sweetness/dryness so there was a fair competition between the two countries.

Then all they had to do was change the music occasionally and monitor which wines were bought when each type of music was playing.

The results were astonishing:

With no music playing the French wine was slightly more popular than the German. However, when they played German music through the speakers the German wine sold twice as fast as the French stuff.

When they played French music the French bottles sold five times as fast as the German ones.

This implies that we are as helpless as krill in the path of a blue whale as far as marketing music is concerned. And the effect is subconscious - only one in eight of the wine buyers realised that the music had influenced their choice.

More about this book

In "Why You Love Music," John Powell, a physicist who has also studied musical composition, offers an array of answers that mainly reflect his scientific background. He conveys some basic musical information painlessly, including tuning and scales, the construction of melodies, and elements of timbre and key. His writing is chatty and unpretentious; he is informal and down-home, at times quite funny. If you have ever felt intimidated by music and its terminology of whole and half steps, scales and chords, this book will put you at ease. - Peter Pesic, Wall Street Journal (£)

Buy the book

Why We Love Music is published byJohn Murray at £9.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £8.49

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The science of songs: how does music affect your body chemistry?

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Classical music makes shoppers buy more. Gentle tunes can cure insomnia. How? Writer, composer and science lecturer John Powell explains

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Once upon a time, I was great at ignoring distractions.

Loud music didn't diminish my concentration. Noisy restaurants didn't make it hard for me to engage in meaningful conversations. Having music on in the background actually helped me study.

Or so I thought.

In some cases, music can improve your performance:

But then there's this: When you need to learn something new, when you need to develop or improve a skill, when you need to synthesize information, when you need to solve a problem... research shows that listening to music makes your performance suffer.

The problem is what scientists call "irrelevant sound." (You may think that music is highly relevant to making your work less boring, and maybe it is, but still.)

When certain tasks are performed in the presence of background sound -- music, conversation, construction, etc. -- the performance of that tasks automatically suffers.

Like when the people around you are chatting about something and you wish they would be quiet so you can concentrate. Or when your neighbor is cutting the grass and you wish they would just (freaking) so you can concentrate. Or when the guy (it's always a guy) next to you on a plane is humming loudly because his headphones mean he can't hear himself and you wish he would just shut the (heck) up.

Or when you listen to music when you need to learn, analyze, or decide.

Even if you think listening to music helps.

Because in those cases, it doesn't.

Especially if you sing along: Research shows that singing along increases your mental workload, which means the brainpower you apply to what you're working on naturally decreases.

Even without research to back it up, that rings true. I can think of times I was driving and singing... and realized I wasn't paying nearly enough attention to driving.

So the next time you're tempted to listen to music, first think about the work you'll be doing. If it's a relatively mindless task, or one you can do so well that it's basically automatic, then by all means crank it up.

But if you need to learn, or evaluate, or make decisions, or apply all your mental effort to whatever is in front of you... then make sure your environment is as quiet as possible.

It may seem boring at first, but your effectiveness and performance and will definitely benefit.

And when you're working on something important -- which, if you think about it, is everything that you do -- what you achieve is what matters most.

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Unless You Do This, Neuroscience Says Listening to Music at Work Will Make You Less Productive

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Once upon a time, I was great at ignoring distractions. Loud music didn't diminish my concentration. Noisy restaurants didn't make it hard for me to engage in meaningful conversations. Having music on in the background actually helped me study. Or so I thought.

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Four Ways Music Strengthens Social Bonds

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Why would human evolution have given us music? New research says the answer may lie in our drive to connect.

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The Science of How Music Affects Your Productivity - Thrive Global

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How music affects your focus, mood, and even physical performance.

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VC Reporter | Times Media Group - News, Culture, Arts and Opinion

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Students at Ventura Unified School District middle and high schools were greeted with a very unwelcome message at the start of this school year. The use of cell phones and earbuds during instructional time was no longer allowed under any circumstances and violations could result in escalating punishment, including temporary confiscation of devices.

The district board of trustees actually approved a cell phone policy back in April of 2021 that stated "devices shall be turned off in class except under the direct supervision of teachers for academic or other purposes." But according to students, the rule went unenforced by many teachers.

So district officials launched an initiative this year clarifying expectations "to promote respectful learning environments between teachers and students, and minimize distractions to maximize learning." Posters were placed in classrooms and teachers have been reminding students to turn off cell phones and keep them out of sight.

The use of earbuds is also prohibited during instructional time, whether or not any sound or music is being played. For high school students, cell phones and earbuds are allowed during non-instructional times such as breaks and lunch. For middle school students the policy says cell phones must be off "at all times during the school day when the student is on campus."

The penalties for violating the rules are also getting more publicity, which include a warning for the first time students are caught using cell phones and earbuds. A fourth offense could result in suspension from school, and upon returning to campus "the student shall be required to turn in their cell phone/earbuds to site administration for safekeeping at the beginning of each day for a designated period of time."

District leaders discussed the policy at their July 11 meeting, where Greg Bayless, assistant superintendent of educational services, said the use of cell phones and earbuds in class became more common after students returned from in-home learning during the pandemic.

"I know that parents and teachers and administrators everywhere cringe when they think of young adults and teenagers and cell phones and earbuds," Bayless told the board. "We have an opportunity here to clarify our expectations all for the purposes of improving learning environments and making the most out of instructional minutes."

Bayless said the issue is not confined to VUSD or even the U.S., noting proposals to ban cell phone use in classrooms in Finland and France. He also told the board that parents who were consulted were largely in agreement, although many did want kids to have access to cell phones in case of an emergency. "But that does not mean they should have earbuds in all the time when we're trying to teach and they have cell phones in their hands or in their pockets being checked every 10 seconds when we're trying to teach. So I do feel like we have broad parental support."

VUSD Director of Communications and Public Information Officer Marieanne Quiroz told the Ventura County Reporter that many students became accustomed to using cell phones and earbuds during instructional time when they were at home for classes during the pandemic.

"For some it became very normal to watch television or listen to music while they were in their online classes. And so we are trying to go back to really paying attention in class and ensuring that when you're there in person with your teacher, you are present and you are engaged and you are involved in discussions that are happening within the classroom," Quiroz said.

She noted that there was a time when students were allowed to use cell phones for academic research, but since returning to campus after the pandemic, all the district's students are assigned devices such as Chromebooks that they have at school and at home so there's less need for personal devices. She also said even with cell phones turned off, parents still have ways to contact students if necessary.

"If there is ever an emergency, just like before cell phones were ever invented, they are more than welcome to call our school office and we will absolutely immediately go pull the student out of class and make sure that they get in touch with their parents," she said.

Foothill Technology High School seniors Tessa Shinden and Olivia Mowad are co-editors-in-chief of the Foothill Dragon Press, an online publication that's won national honors for excellence in digital journalism since it was founded in 2009. A Sept. 2 article detailed the efforts to publicize the cell phone rules, and included reactions from a math teacher who said the initiative has had a positive impact on classroom engagement and a student who said cell phones can be helpful to use in class and did not see them as a disruption.

Shinden, 16, told the VCReporter that when students first returned to campus after the pandemic, many teachers didn't seem to mind the use of electronic devices. "We would be able to listen to music in class if we were doing work, which we can't do anymore because there's no earbuds allowed," she said. "Some were more relaxed about it than others. Some were kind of strict about not wanting them out during certain periods of time."

Overall, the cell phone policy has generated anger among students, Shinden said. "The good majority of people that I know and have talked to were upset because we felt like it was very sudden. It's a technology high school. So we do our best to integrate technology with the learning in the classroom."

Mowad, 17, told the VCReporter that despite the anger among some students, there might be a silver lining to increased enforcement of the cell phone policy. "Personally, for me, it's been a little bit easier to pay attention to my teachers and stuff if my phone is away and not receiving notifications."

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Hanging up: VUSD bans cell phones, earbuds during class

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Students at Ventura Unified School District middle and high schools were greeted with a very unwelcome message at the start of this school year. The use of cell phones and