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Author David Byrne explains the necessity of “visual and auditory cues” to trigger mirror neurons that allow the human brain to feel empathy. That empathy is the crutches of human connection and emotional reaction to music.

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In an excerpt from his new book, David Byrne explains why sometimes, he prefers hearing nothing

Smithsonian Magazine |

I listen to music only at very specific times. When I go out to hear it live, most obviously. When I'm cooking or doing the dishes I put on music, and sometimes other people are present. When I'm jogging or cycling to and from work down New York's West Side Highway bike path, or if I'm in a rented car on the rare occasions I have to drive somewhere, I listen alone. And when I'm writing and recording music, I listen to what I'm working on. But that's it.

I find music somewhat intrusive in restaurants or bars. Maybe due to my involvement with it, I feel I have to either listen intently or tune it out. Mostly I tune it out; I often don't even notice if a Talking Heads song is playing in most public places. Sadly, most music then becomes (for me) an annoying sonic layer that just adds to the background noise.

As music becomes less of a thing-a cylinder, a cassette, a disc-and more ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performances again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I'm now getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I've pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.

I go to at least one live performance a week, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. There are other people there. Often there is beer, too. After more than a hundred years of technological innovation, the digitization of music has inadvertently had the effect of emphasizing its social function. Not only do we still give friends copies of music that excites us, but increasingly we have come to value the social aspect of a live performance more than we used to. Music technology in some ways appears to have been on a trajectory in which the end result is that it will destroy and devalue itself. It will succeed completely when it self-destructs. The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it's composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor.

Does our enjoyment of music-our ability to find a sequence of sounds emotionally affecting-have some neurological basis? From an evolutionary standpoint, does enjoying music provide any advantage? Is music of any truly practical use, or is it simply baggage that got carried along as we evolved other more obviously useful adaptations? Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and biologist Richard Lewontin wrote a paper in 1979 claiming that some of our skills and abilities might be like spandrels-the architectural negative spaces above the curve of the arches of buildings-details that weren't originally designed as autonomous entities, but that came into being as a result of other, more practical elements around them.

Dale Purves, a professor at Duke University, studied this question with his colleagues David Schwartz and Catherine Howe, and they think they might have some answers. They discovered that the sonic range that matters and interests us the most is identical to the range of sounds we ourselves produce. Our ears and our brains have evolved to catch subtle nuances mainly within that range, and we hear less, or often nothing at all, outside of it. We can't hear what bats hear, or the subharmonic sound that whales use. For the most part, music also falls into the range of what we can hear. Though some of the harmonics that give voices and instruments their characteristic sounds are beyond our hearing range, the effects they produce are not. The part of our brain that analyzes sounds in those musical frequencies that overlap with the sounds we ourselves make is larger and more developed-just as the visual analysis of faces is a specialty of another highly developed part of the brain.

The Purves group also added to this the assumption that periodic sounds- sounds that repeat regularly-are generally indicative of living things, and are therefore more interesting to us. A sound that occurs over and over could be something to be wary of, or it could lead to a friend, or a source of food or water. We can see how these parameters and regions of interest narrow down toward an area of sounds similar to what we call music. Purves surmised that it would seem natural that human speech therefore influenced the evolution of the human auditory system as well as the part of the brain that processes those audio signals. Our vocalizations, and our ability to perceive their nuances and subtlety, co-evolved.

In a UCLA study, neurologists Istvan Molnar-Szakacs and Katie Overy watched brain scans to see which neurons fired while people and monkeys observed other people and monkeys perform specific actions or experience specific emotions. They determined that a set of neurons in the observer "mirrors" what they saw happening in the observed. If you are watching an athlete, for example, the neurons that are associated with the same muscles the athlete is using will fire. Our muscles don't move, and sadly there's no virtual workout or health benefit from watching other people exert themselves, but the neurons do act as if we are mimicking the observed. This mirror effect goes for emotional signals as well. When we see someone frown or smile, the neurons associated with those facial muscles will fire. But-and here's the significant part-the emotional neurons associated with those feelings fire as well. Visual and auditory clues trigger empathetic neurons. Corny but true: If you smile you will make other people happy. We feel what the other is feeling-maybe not as strongly, or as profoundly-but empathy seems to be built into our neurology. It has been proposed that this shared representation (as neuroscientists call it) is essential for any type of communication. The ability to experience a shared representation is how we know what the other person is getting at, what they're talking about. If we didn't have this means of sharing common references, we wouldn't be able to communicate.

It's sort of stupidly obvious-of course we feel what others are feeling, at least to some extent. If we didn't, then why would we ever cry at the movies or smile when we heard a love song? The border between what you feel and what I feel is porous. That we are social animals is deeply ingrained and makes us what we are. We think of ourselves as individuals, but to some extent we are not; our very cells are joined to the group by these evolved empathic reactions to others. This mirroring isn't just emotional, it's social and physical, too. When someone gets hurt we "feel" their pain, though we don't collapse in agony. And when a singer throws back his head and lets loose, we understand that as well. We have an interior image of what he is going through when his body assumes that shape.

We anthropomorphize abstract sounds, too. We can read emotions when we hear someone's footsteps. Simple feelings-sadness, happiness and anger-are pretty easily detected. Footsteps might seem an obvious example, but it shows that we connect all sorts of sounds to our assumptions about what emotion, feeling or sensation generated that sound.

The UCLA study proposed that our appreciation and feeling for music are deeply dependent on mirror neurons. When you watch, or even just hear, someone play an instrument, the neurons associated with the muscles required to play that instrument fire. Listening to a piano, we "feel" those hand and arm movements, and as any air guitarist will tell you, when you hear or see a scorching solo, you are "playing" it, too. Do you have to know how to play the piano to be able to mirror a piano player? Edward W. Large at Florida Atlantic University scanned the brains of people with and without music experience as they listened to Chopin. As you might guess, the mirror neuron system lit up in the musicians who were tested, but somewhat surprisingly, it flashed in non-musicians as well. So, playing air guitar isn't as weird as it sometimes seems. The UCLA group contends that all of our means of communication-auditory, musical, linguistic, visual-have motor and muscular activities at their root. By reading and intuiting the intentions behind those motor activities, we connect with the underlying emotions. Our physical state and our emotional state are inseparable-by perceiving one, an observer can deduce the other.

People dance to music as well, and neurological mirroring might explain why hearing rhythmic music inspires us to move, and to move in very specific ways. Music, more than many of the arts, triggers a whole host of neurons. Multiple regions of the brain fire upon hearing music: muscular, auditory, visual, linguistic. That's why some folks who have completely lost their language abilities can still articulate a text when it is sung. Oliver Sacks wrote about a brain-damaged man who discovered that he could sing his way through his mundane daily routines, and only by doing so could he remember how to complete simple tasks like getting dressed. Melodic intonation therapy is the name for a group of therapeutic techniques that were based on this discovery.

Mirror neurons are also predictive. When we observe an action, posture, gesture or a facial expression, we have a good idea, based on our past experience, what is coming next. Some on the Asperger spectrum might not intuit all those meanings as easily as others, and I'm sure I'm not alone in having been accused of missing what friends thought were obvious cues or signals. But most folks catch at least a large percentage of them. Maybe our innate love of narrative has some predictive, neurological basis; we have developed the ability to be able to feel where a story might be going. Ditto with a melody. We might sense the emotionally resonant rise and fall of a melody, a repetition, a musical build, and we have expectations, based on experience, about where those actions are leading-expectations that will be confirmed or slightly redirected depending on the composer or performer. As cognitive scientist Daniel Levitin points out, too much confirmation-when something happens exactly as it did before-causes us to get bored and to tune out. Little variations keep us alert, as well as serving to draw attention to musical moments that are critical to the narrative.

Music does so many things to us that one can't simply say, as many do, "Oh, I love all kinds of music." Really? But some forms of music are diametrically opposed to one another! You can't love them all. Not all the time, anyway.

In 1969, Unesco passed a resolution outlining a human right that doesn't get talked about much-the right to silence. I think they're referring to what happens if a noisy factory gets built beside your house, or a shooting range, or if a disco opens downstairs. They don't mean you can demand that a restaurant turn off the classic rock tunes it's playing, or that you can muzzle the guy next to you on the train yelling into his cellphone. It's a nice thought though-despite our innate dread of absolute silence, we should have the right to take an occasional aural break, to experience, however briefly, a moment or two of sonic fresh air. To have a meditative moment, a head-clearing space, is a nice idea for a human right.

John Cage wrote a book called, somewhat ironically, Silence. Ironic because he was increasingly becoming notorious for noise and chaos in his compositions. He once claimed that silence doesn't exist for us. In a quest to experience it, he went into an anechoic chamber, a room isolated from all outside sounds, with walls designed to inhibit the reflection of sounds. A dead space, acoustically. After a few moments he heard a thumping and whooshing, and was informed those sounds were his own heartbeat and the sound of his blood rushing through his veins and arteries. They were louder than he might have expected, but okay. After a while, he heard another sound, a high whine, and was informed that this was his nervous system. He realized then that for human beings there was no such thing as true silence, and this anecdote became a way of explaining that he decided that rather than fighting to shut out the sounds of the world, to compartmentalize music as something outside of the noisy, uncontrollable world of sounds, he'd let them in: "Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for manmade theories or expressions of human sentiments." Conceptually at least, the entire world now became music.

If music is inherent in all things and places, then why not let music play itself? The composer, in the traditional sense, might no longer be necessary. Let the planets and spheres spin. Musician Bernie Krause has just come out with a book about "biophony"-the world of music and sounds made by animals, insects and the nonhuman environment. Music made by self-organizing systems means that anyone or anything can make it, and anyone can walk away from it. John Cage said the contemporary composer "resembles the maker of a camera who allows someone else to take the picture." That's sort of the elimination of authorship, at least in the accepted sense. He felt that traditional music, with its scores that instruct which note should be played and when, are not reflections of the processes and algorithms that activate and create the world around us. The world indeed offers us restricted possibilities and opportunities, but there are always options, and more than one way for things to turn out. He and others wondered if maybe music might partake of this emergent process.

A small device made in China takes this idea one step further. The Buddha Machine is a music player that uses random algorithms to organize a series of soothing tones and thereby create never-ending, non-repeating melodies. The programmer who made the device and organized its sounds replaces the composer, effectively leaving no performer. The composer, the instrument and the performer are all one machine. These are not very sophisticated devices, though one can envision a day when all types of music might be machine-generated. The basic, commonly used patterns that occur in various genres could become the algorithms that guide the manufacture of sounds. One might view much of corporate pop and hip-hop as being machine-made-their formulas are well established, and one need only choose from a variety of available hooks and beats, and an endless recombinant stream of radio-friendly music emerges. Though this industrial approach is often frowned on, its machine-made nature could just as well be a compliment-it returns musical authorship to the ether. All these developments imply that we've come full circle: We've returned to the idea that our universe might be permeated with music.

I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I'm deeply conservative as well-if a song establishes itself within the pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn't play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-do I have to choose between the two?

Excerpted from How Music Works by David Byrne, published by McSweeney's Books, © 2012 by Todo Mundo Ltd.

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Smithsonian Magazine | I listen to music only at very specific times. When I go out to hear it live, most obviously. When I'm cooking or doing the dishes I put on music, and sometimes other people are present.

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Author Corey Binns states“ It is the listener who gives life to the emotions in music." This means that without an audience that can relate and empathize with the song interpretation, lyrical content, and body language, the emotional plea of a vocal performance becomes irrelevant.

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For a willing music audience, the art of drawing emotion from notes is classic.

Composers play with subtle, intricate changes and rates of change to try and elicit emotion. In recent studies, scientists found that people already familiar with the music are more likely to catch a chill at key moments:

When a symphony turns from loud to quiet

Upon entry of a solo voice or instrument

When two singers have contrasting voices

People covered in goose bumps also tend to be driven more by rewards, and less inclined to be thrill- and adventure-seekers, according to research conducted at the Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians' Medicine in Hanover, Germany.

"Our results suggest that chills depend very much on our ability to interpret the music," said Oliver Grewe, a biologist and musicologist at the institute. "Music is a recreative activity. Even if it is relaxing to listen to, the listener has to recreate its meaning, the feelings it expresses. It is the listener who gives life to the emotions in music."

The researchers' latest findings are currently being reviewed for journal publication, while their previous research has been published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Music can do more than just give you goose bumps. A melody can:

Listening to your favorite hits can shift your breathing pattern and speed up your heart rate.

Shivers down the spine even show up in brain scans, according to research at McGill University. As chills grow in intensity, bloodflow increases between areas of the brain associated with euphoria-inducing vices like food, sex, and drugs.

In the near future, the German research team plans to further study the central nervous system's reactions to music that gives fans the chills.

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For a willing music audience, the art of drawing emotion from notes is classic. Composers play with subtle, intricate changes and rates of change to try and elicit emotion.

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“Music Induced Emotional and Music Processing in the Brain”, published in January 2018 by authors B Geethanjali, Kanagasabai Adalarasu, and Mohan Jagannath. Music affects the human subconscious mind, mood, and behavior based on one's subjective perception of a song and how it stimulates the brain. The majority of whether or not a singer receives an emotional response from an audience relies larger on factors he or she can not control.

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JCDR - Cognitive performance, Electroencephalography, Human perception, Music research

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Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research aims to publish findings of doctors at grass root level and post graduate students, so that all unique medical experiences are recorded in literature.

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In the interview I conducted with Diablo Valley College Psychology Professor Ray Faulkenberry he reiterated that individual audience embers and performer are connected by shared representation of emotion and the stimulation of mirror neurons in the brain. He conclusively explained that shared experiences allows humans to develop empathy which leads to compassion and motivation to perceive things in a similar way. He unexpectedly disagreed with my conclusion, that body language is irrelevant when trying to evoke emotion from an audience during a vocal performance. He created the impression that the lyrics are the most important part of any song that attempts to receive and emotional reaction from an audience.

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Author John Lieff M.D argues that music with physical triggers stimulates the brain more effectively and creates a stronger emotional response than a performance with just auditory stimulus. “The most powerful effects often occur in the context of music.”

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Previous posts have described the unique effects of music on the neuroplasticity for learning, the development and evolution of language, improvisation, emotions and spirituality. This post will update the specific emotional brain circuits stimulated by music that affect socialization.
Even very young babies show emotional responses to music. At five months, babies enjoy moving in time to music. In adults, perhaps the most important use of music is in evoking, experiencing and regulating emotions related to social interaction. This includes the use of music in child parent bonding, meetings, performances, religious services and spiritual practices.

Music can alter subjective feelings; physiological states through autonomic nervous and endocrine systems; body motor responses such as smiling and tapping; and whole body movement of dancing, clapping and playing of musical instruments.
Current conclusions are that limbic brain regions such as the amygdala are a major part of the emotional stimulus from music. Also, the reward network that includes the dopamine mesolimbic centers in the nucleus accumbens are critical for the pleasure derived from some music. These centers are essential in all other pleasurable events, including the distorted pleasures of addictions. The hippocampus, which is a critical part of memory and learning in the brain, is a major part of musical effects on social engagement and attachment. This hippocampal effect is more than the influence of memories on emotional states and is described below.
Unconscious Brain Systems Stimulating "Moving to the Beat"
The unconscious brain circuits for sound appear to be very old in evolution.
The system for hearing sounds evolved from the vestibular brain network that responds to balance in space. The vestibular system still responds in some ways to sound as well as balance. Two vestibular structures, the saccule and the utricle, respond to vibrations from sounds.

The vestibular system has a strong influence on the effect of loud sounds, especially very low sounds and those that occur suddenly. The vestibular brain nuclei, as well as the auditory cochlear nuclei, are connected to the brain region that activates awakeness, the reticular system. It also mingles with fibers of the autonomic system and the system that innervates the major organs. This can be experienced by lack of balance causing GI symptoms like nausea.
But, in music responses of the balance system effect musical arousal. The processing of sound information below the cortex greatly influences muscular and autonomic activity and allows a subconscious effect of wanting to "move to the beat." This unconscious powerful effect has been used to help Parkinson's patients improve walking with a beat.
Core Emotion Networks
Music stimulates all brain regions that are considered the core of emotional processing.
Amygdala

The top amygdala layer receives signals from the smell centers, and responds to faces, sounds and music-especially happy music. These responses are related to emotions connected with social contacts. During happy music there are strong connections from the amygdala to the dopamine driven nucleus accumbens (addiction center). This dopamine center is not as involved in fearful music.

A basic center of the amygdala, the laterobasal, is the main way sound information enters along with other senses. This center responds to both happy and fearful signals and is correlated with stimulation of goal directed behavior. Signals from higher cortical centers are mingled with this center for hearing and direct sensory input from the thalamus.

Nucleus Accumbens (NA)
The NA is highly connected to many other brain regions, higher (cingulate cortex, anterior insula) and lower (thalamus - the center of incoming sensory data). All of these regions are involved in pleasure from music.
These centers are thought to be very old in evolution and related to survival. The power of music is intricately related to the earliest survival activity. This can been seen in music's great importance for cohesion in all societies. When listening to music these pleasure centers are connected to the auditory cortex related to hearing. Interestingly, research shows that the more activity that occurs between the auditory cortex and the NA predicts whether a song will be purchased.

Hippocampus

In recent years the view of the hippocampus has changed from just dealing with learning, memory and space because it is powerfully connected to the critical stress system of the hypothalamus, the pituitary and the adrenal-know as the HPA axis. The stress system is a key brain center - very connected to all types of emotional response including the critical stress reactions that impact the whole body and immune functions.
The hippocampus is damaged by severe stress, with reduction of new neuron production during depression, PTSD and abuse. During recovery from depression and stress, the production of new brain cells in the hippocampus increases. Also, attachment and tender feelings are correlated to with the amount of new brain cells, with less new neurons when there are no tender feelings. These same people with less tender feelings have less response to music as well. Also, those who are subjected to persistent loud sounds that cause stress have reductions in the hippocampus activity and cells. In this regard, music has a strong effect on social activity and is used for social bonding including singing at religious services, the national anthem, marching and dancing. These effects of music are related to these strong connections of the hippocampus, amygdala and the HPA system. Such musical activities, also, are critical for survival of the community.
During musical social events, people are very focused, and have shared emotions and shared activity. Previous posts have shown that neuroplasticity effects are strongly related to the size of the brain circuit. The most powerful effects often occur in the context of music with very large circuits including physical activity, emotional experiences, memory of related events and learning-all at the same time. Just tapping along with music at an event increases hippocampal activity and neuroplastic learning.

The effects of music in these situations includes a sense of participation that becomes an experience of a large "we" involving all of the participants. This is seen at rallies and spiritual events. The music automatically translates into a sense of community and a shared sense of movement. Social interaction is greatly increased in these situations including learning to perceive oneself as part of something bigger. In evolution, this function of music, which increases cooperation and socialization, might be the most important.
Music can decrease stress by decreasing cortisol in the HPA system. But, the opposite can occur with harsh stressful sounds.
In patients with frontal temporal dementia there is less ability to recognize music that is joyful, sad, or fearful. This correlates with loss of neurons in amygdala, OFC, cingulate and insula. Patients with specific amygdala and hippocampus damage have loss of recognition of emotion in music. A specific region in the parahippocampal cortex alters music that changes the experience of dissonant or unpleasant sounds to pleasant.

Music and Emotion
The first is the very complex effect of music causing increased interaction among people at many different levels. The second is the tension that is created by the structure of music and how this interacts with the brain. The third is the fact that affecting one region of muscles or nerves reverberates through the feedback loops causing increasing emotion. The following is a brief discussion of each.
How Does Music Increase Social Interaction

Human beings naturally engage in social events; they are inherently social and cooperative. Positive social experiences reward us with fun and happiness. Social rejection and isolation causes immune deficiencies ( see post).

Music stimulates social interaction in many different ways. People join together in every society to sing, drum and dance, which appears to fulfill this basic need for socialization. Experiencing music together, either listening or making music, increases general cooperation. This increased cooperation can decrease tension and conflicts and increase empathy because of shared experiences. Music leads to increased social group cohesion. It fulfills people's need to belong.

When listening to music, the brain attempts to understand the composer's intentions, which stimulates social cognition. Also, in the interaction with parent and child, both language and music increase communication.

A previous post on neuroplasticity showed that the strongest learning occurs when wide brain circuits are all used at the same time. This was demonstrated by increased learning when teachers point with their hands, and increased performance for high jumpers when they prepare with imaging that includes hand movements. (see post.)

When actions and movements are coordinated in a group through tapping, rhythmic clapping, dancing, marching this neuroplasticity occurs in the entire group at the same time. Coordinated movements are pleasurable as witnessed by social dances. It increases trust and cooperation. Even with babies, they prefer live music and drumming to a drum machine or recording.

At the finest level of performance in choirs, symphonies and bands, the very high level of cooperation increases future cooperation.

Tension - Musical Expectation
Music creates a tension of a timed sequence of tones and chords. These structures have emotional effects. Some of the factors are the well-known dissonance and consonance, loudness, pace, and the qualities of the sounds as pleasant or not. These factors can increase enjoyment or tension.
Consonance and dissonance affects the auditory signal of the brainstem and affects activity in the amygdala. The higher cortical brain predicts what will happen and creates expectations that lead to a building emotional reaction and desire for it to continue in specific ways. The changes of the beat by increasing speed or slowing down affect these expectations. In melodic music, emphasizing the basic melody has a building effect. Leaving the basic pattern creates tension, which is resolved upon returning to the original pattern. The tension is rewarding if predictions occur and the more complex the route to the resolution the more satisfying. The context is important. For a simple dance there is little expectation. But, for spiritual music, the tension of sin and resolution of redemption become very important.
Because of this improvisation of all types has very powerful effects.
Surprise and not following predictions can have many effects even when the musical piece is listened to more than once. Unexpected events alter skin electrical conductance and in the amygdala with the degree related to how much it is not expected. Random chaotic changes don't have this effect. In the unexpected events there is a bridge and then a resolution with an even stronger emotional reaction. The expectation of resolution becomes very strong and elicits a strong emotion.

Certain chord patterns are so well known (a dominant seventh leading to a tonic chord) that they will bring about an anticipation of resolution that is very strong leading to dopamine in the reward centers.
Physical reactions to specific types of music create a feedback loop in the autonomic nervous system that spreads strong emotions. An example is when happy music triggers the muscles in the jaw with increased electrical activity and an increase in breathing. Sad music stimulates the muscles surrounding the eyes.
Emotional contagion

A feeling of happiness and sadness appear to be a feedback effect of these muscular activations.

Studies show that visual information takes precedence to music in the multi sensory brain (see post). Pictures, clips have dramatic effects on the emotional reactions from music. Even facial and gestural expressions or movements, such as dance movements greatly increases emotions.
In fearful reactions to music the auditory cortex is highly connected with the visual cortex, the insula and cingulate cortex. These visual and auditory circuits are part of a generalized reaction to fearful situations. When a fearful sound is heard, the visual center immediately scans for fearful images as well.
A provocative study showed that our judgments about a musical performance might have more to do with sight that the sound. In this study of both trained and untrained musicians observing music competition, judgment about the quality of a music performance depended more on how a musician moves and looks than what they sound like.
Musical effects on the brain are found to be more fundamental the more that is learned about the brain. The unique effects of music on the brain appear to work through core brain circuits that connect people into cooperative social interactions including bonding of parent and child. These effects of music have been important in evolution. Very ancient reactions to danger utilize fundamental multi sensory aspects of the brain, which are stimulated by music; this includes the connections of the vestibular, visual and auditory systems. Different types of music stimulate different emotions and increase signaling in the endocrine systems including the critical stress circuits of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Music also influences oxytocin, the hormone related to bonding. Feedback loops throughout the brain including the emotion centers, the addictive centers, memory, and the higher cortical centers, are all stimulated by music causing increased socialization. The socializing affects of music are demonstrated in every society with singing, drumming, dancing, tapping and marching being critical activities. These effects of song are also expressed in many animals, especially birds. The more that is learned about music, the more it is found to have unique effects in evolution, human life and the circuits of the brain. Music plays many very critical roles in human society, including social connectedness, learning and spirituality.
Music Stimulates Emotions Through Specific Brain Circuits

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Music Stimulates Emotions Through Specific Brain Circuits

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Previous posts have described the unique effects of music on the neuroplasticity for learning, the development and evolution of language, improvisation, emotions and spirituality. This post will update the specific emotional brain circuits stimulated by music that affect socialization. Even very young babies show emotional responses to music.

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Author Natalie Angier reports the profound discovery that the brain has designated neural pathways that process music. I found that the parts of the brain that respond to music also create emotion.

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Basics

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Credit Credit Marcos Chin

Whether to enliven a commute, relax in the evening or drown out the buzz of a neighbor's recreational drone, Americans listen to music nearly four hours a day. In international surveys, people consistently rank music as one of life's supreme sources of pleasure and emotional power. We marry to music, graduate to music, mourn to music. Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago - 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

Given the antiquity, universality and deep popularity of music, many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology, and the quest to understand the neural basis of a quintessential human passion foundered.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music - any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener's auditory cortex will fire in response.

Other sounds, by contrast - a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing - leave the musical circuits unmoved.

Nancy Kanwisher and Josh H. McDermott, professors of neuroscience at M.I.T., and their postdoctoral colleague Sam Norman-Haignere reported their results in the journal Neuron. The findings offer researchers a new tool for exploring the contours of human musicality.

"Why do we have music?" Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. "Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address."

Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. - the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience - and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence - this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.

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Credit Marcos Chin

Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain's sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other's sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.

The new paper "takes a very innovative approach and is of great importance," said Josef Rauschecker, director of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition at Georgetown University. "The idea that the brain gives specialized treatment to music recognition, that it regards music as fundamental a category as speech, is very exciting to me."

In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. "There are theories that music is older than speech or language," he said. "Some even argue that speech evolved from music."

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, "music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do."

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, the director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, said that when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.

"The story was, oh, what's special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together," she said. Some researchers dismissed music as "auditory cheesecake," a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. "This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech."

Dr. Kanwisher's lab is widely recognized for its pioneering work on human vision, and the discovery that key portions of the visual cortex are primed to instantly recognize a few highly meaningful objects in the environment, like faces and human body parts. The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg - sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?

To address the question, Dr. McDermott, a former club and radio disc jockey, and Dr. Norman-Haignere, an accomplished classical guitarist, began gathering a library of everyday sounds - music, speech, laughter, weeping, whispering, tires squealing, flags flapping, dishes clattering, flames crackling, wind chimes tinkling. Wherever they went, they asked for suggestions. Had they missed anything?

They put the lengthy list up for a vote on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service to determine which of their candidate sounds were most easily recognized and frequently heard. That mass survey yielded a set of 165 distinctive and readily identifiable sound clips of two seconds each (listen to a selection of them here). The researchers then scanned the brains of 10 volunteers (none of them musicians) as they listened to multiple rounds of the 165 sound clips.

Focusing on the brain's auditory region - located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears - the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.

"The strength of our method is that it's hypothesis-neutral," Dr. McDermott said. "We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking."

The computations generated six basic response patterns, six ways the brain categorized incoming noise. But what did the categories correspond to? Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain's perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.

"The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it," Dr. Norman-Haignere said. "That's one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous."

The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note's pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.

"It's difficult to come up with a dictionary definition," Dr. McDermott said. "I tend to think music is best defined by example."

Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court likewise said of pornography that he knew it when he saw it. Maybe music is a kind of cheesecake after all.

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Basics Whether to enliven a commute, relax in the evening or drown out the buzz of a neighbor's recreational drone, Americans listen to music nearly four hours a day. In international surveys, people consistently rank music as one of life's supreme sources of pleasure and emotional power.

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Author David Eagleman states, "The conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg of our mental processes."  Most of our judgments and emotional responses are controlled by the unconscious brain.

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This is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue forThis is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue for whoever's research and theories they agree with. I can give you some of my own personal (and I try really hard to be objective and steer clear of opinions, but that will always have a role so that's just my warning label of sorts, ha) but because this is such a big topic today it'd help if you were more specific... do you mean subconscious mind just basically like how we make decisions, fears, etc or do you want to go deeper meaning the abnormal subconscious mind and/or subconscious mind of trauma, etc. there are so many good out there. If you want recs let me know, but another good way to find is to do a bit of research online and/or going to a book store and looking at several books that deal with your specific questions... I hope this helps! ...more (less)

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This is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue forThis is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue for whoever's research and theories they agree with.

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Scholars Jacob Jolij and Maaike Meurs explain that an observer's predetermined mood effects how they interpret and respond to emotional stimuli. The authors discovered that the perception of visual stimulus larger coincided with the mood the observer is in. The emotional response has less to do with the singer and more to do with the audience's mood, state of mind, and willingness to empathize.

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Abstract

Introduction

One of the key tasks of the visual system is to provide the brain's executive systems with a stable, meaningful representation of the visual environment. This is not a trivial task, though: sensory input is often noisy, and more often than not open to several interpretations. In order to effectively process visual input, top-down information processing plays an important role in visual perception. The brain actively uses contextual information to generate a priori hypotheses about the most likely interpretation of specific sensory input [1]-[5]. For example, if you are in a meadow, a black-and-white pattern hitting your retina quite likely signals presence of a cow. According to a number of recent neuroimaging studies, the context of a meadow would pre-activate higher-level representations of object commonly encountered in meadows, such as cows. This information is fed back to earlier visual areas and compared with the actual perceptual input [2]-[5].

Top-down effects do not only speed up perceptual processing, they also affect perceptual awareness. In a recent psychophysical investigation, it was shown that observers perceive the color of a black-and-white picture of a banana as slightly yellowish - an effect attributed to a top-down filling in process, guided by memory: you know that bananas are yellow, so the brain fills in that color automatically [6]. Indeed, the notion of a 'Bayesian brain' - the idea that the brain is continuously predicting the most likely interpretation of new visual input on basis of context and memory, providing priors for analysis - gained a large amount of support in the recent literature [4].

However, the 'Bayesian priors' used in visual information processing are not set by perceptual memory alone. Higher level concepts, such as expectancy can affect subjective perception, too. When observers are led to believe that wearing a pair of glasses that have no effect on perception will make them see a multistable stimulus in one specific way, they overwhelmingly report that specific percept [7]. Moreover, in challenging stimulus detection tasks observers sometimes strongly believe to have seen stimuli that in fact have not been presented at all. Such misperceptions are also attributed to top-down processes [8]-[10].

Apparently, how we perceive our environment is for a large part determined by what we think. However, perceptual processing is not only influenced by cognitive or meta-cognitive processes. Emotion, and in particular mood, have been demonstrated to have an equally strong effect on perceptual processing. Mood affects the focus of processing: negative mood is associated with 'local' processing, whereas positive mood is associated with 'global' processing. When participants have to retell a brief story they had to memorize, participants in a negative mood tend to report details, whereas participants in a positive mood tend to report the gist of the story. Interestingly, in perceptual processing, a similar effect is observed. In an experiment in which participants had to rate whether a target object was more similar to an object that matched its global features or an object that matched its local features, participants in a negative mood showed a bias for the local features, whereas participants in a positive mood showed a bias for global features [11].

Not surprisingly, mood also has profound effects on the processing of emotional visual stimuli. Humans show a bias towards negative emotional material, the so-called negativity bias. This bias is already evident within the earliest stages of perceptual processing of pictures with emotional content. A positive mood however, induced by a brief music clip played right after presentation of an emotional picture, overcomes this negativity bias, as shown using brain evoked potentials [12]. Mood also affects the processing of facial expressions: when a face slowly morphs from a positive to a negative emotional expression, participants in a negative mood will indicate that the facial expression becomes negative at an earlier moment than participants in a positive mood [13], [14]. In ambiguous schematic facial expressions, mood, as induced with music, affects classification: whereas participants in a positive mood are more likely to judge the expression of an ambiguous face as positive, participants in a negative mood will judge that same face to have a negative emotional expression [15], [16]. These effects are not limited to facial expressions. A recent study found similar effects for emotional body language: participants were more accurate in identifying emotional body language that was congruent with their mood than incongruent emotional body language [17].

Summarizing, our visual representation of the world around us is not only affected by what we think or what we believe. How we feel has a profound impact on the 'picture in our mind' as well. In the present study, we further investigate the effect of mood, as induced by music, on top-down processing of visual information. We let observers do a difficult stimulus detection task, in which they had to detect schematic emotional faces embedded in noise, whilst listening to music that made them happy or sad. Critically, we left out the targets in half of all trials. In line with earlier studies, we found strong mood-congruency effects, that is, participants were better in detecting mood-congruent faces. However, participants also made a significant number of false alarms. The content of these illusory percepts was also strongly modulated by mood, showing that mood not only enhances sensitivity to mood-congruent features in visual input, but can even determine content of visual perception in absence of real visual input.

Materials and Methods

Ethics statement

The study was approved by the local Ethics Committee ("Ethische Commissie van het Heymans Instituut voor Psychologisch Onderzoek") and conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from all observers.

Observers

Observers were 43 healthy first year students (17 males, mean age 20.7 years, SD 1.2 years) in the International Bachelor's Programme in Psychology of the University of Groningen with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Visual stimulation

Stimuli were constructed using Matlab R14 (The Mathworks Inc., Natick, Massachusetts), and consisted of a 140×140 pixels array of random noise, with a circle with a diameter of 74 pixels present in the centre, with slightly elevated contrast. All 255 values of the grayscale palette were used to construct the random noise images. Target stimuli contained also a pair of eyes, eyebrows, and a mouth within the circle, forming a schematic face with a sad or a happy expression. Schematic faces have been shown to carry similar emotional content as real faces, and may thus be used to study the effects of emotion in perception tasks [18].

Stimulus presentation was done using in-house written software (Taskmania, University of Groningen, The Netherlands). Stimuli were presented on a 19″ Philips Brilliance 190B TFT monitor (Philips BV, Eindhoven, The Netherlands) with a resolution of 800×600 pixels; viewing distance was approximately 80 cm. Trials were animations of 9 frames, with each frame presented for approximately 107 ms. The fifth frame of each animation was accompanied by a cue (a grey square around the noise patch) and contained a target stimulus in 50% of all trials. Target presence and target identity (happy or sad) were chosen at random in each trial to avoid expectancy or learning effects. Noise patches were chosen at random from a series of 500 different noise images; targets, if present, were chosen from a series of 50 happy and 50 sad images. Please note that only the noise pattern added to these images was different - the schematic faces were identical in all trials in which a real target was presented.

After each trial, participants had to indicate whether they had seen a sad face or a happy face by using the computer keyboard (the P and Q keys, respectively), or to withhold from responding when they had not seen a face. They were specifically instructed to be conservative with their responses, i.e. to only respond when they were absolutely sure to have seen a face. No feedback was given.

Music manipulation

Participants were instructed to bring at least 15 minutes of songs that made them feel happy and 15 minutes of songs that made them feel sad. They were left completely free in their choice of musical style, and indeed the material widely varied between subjects (e.g. 'Under the Bridge' by The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Mozart's 'Requiem').

Mood assessment

Participants' mood was assessed using the Self Assessment Manakin, a non-verbal assessment technique to measure the pleasure, arousal, and dominance associated with a person's affective state, and is widely used in emotion research [19]. We have specifically chosen a non-verbal assessment tool: participants were recruited from an International Bachelor's Programme, and native languages of participants differed. Using a non-verbal tool avoids problems due to translation or interpretation as result of differences in fluency in English.

Experimental procedure

The experiment consisted of three experimental conditions: a condition in which the participants performed the task without music (no music condition), a condition in which they listened to happy music, and a condition in which they listened to sad music. Participants listened to their own material whilst performing two blocks of 100 trials of the task in each of the three conditions (no music, sad music, happy music). Each condition lasted at most 10 minutes, and music was played throughout the entire condition. Music was played via an MP3-player over headphones. Participants chose a volume that they found comfortable. The order of the conditions was counterbalanced over all participants. Participants' mood was assessed using the SAM at the start of the experiment, and immediately after each condition.

Analyses

Data were analyzed using SPSS version 16.0 (SPSS Inc., Natick, USA). Repeated measures ANOVAs, with type of music as within-subject factor with three levels (no music, happy music, sad music), were conducted on the three scales of the SAM (valence, dominance, and arousal), the detection and identification rates for happy and sad faces, the proportion of false alarms, and the proportion of false alarms classified as happy faces.

Results

Music significantly affected mood, as measured with the valence scale of the SAM, F(2, 36) = 43,639, p = 0.00000. Participants reported a significantly more positive mood as compared with the no music condition after listening to happy music (p = 0.0000), and a more negative mood after listening to sad music (p = 0.00065). Arousal was also significantly elevated by music, F(2, 36) = 3,26, p = .044; there was no significant difference between happy and sad music. No significant effects on the dominance scale of the SAM were observed.

Overall, participants performed the stimulus detection task very well (average correct detection and identification rate were both 83%). Stimulus detection rates were elevated in the music conditions as compared with the no music condition, albeit not significantly (no music 80%, music-congruent faces 84%, music-incongruent faces 83%; F(2, 36) = 2.817; p = 0.065). Moreover, music did have a significant effect on emotion identification (F(2, 36) = 10.200; p = 0.00000): while listening to happy music, participants were more accurate in detecting happy faces then when listening to sad music and vice versa (87% vs. 79%; p = 0.00029) - see . This is consistent with earlier reported effects of mood congruency in emotion detection [13]-[17].

However, we also found strong effects of music in trials in which no real stimulus was presented. Participants reported slightly more false alarms in the music conditions than in the no music condition, but this effect was not significant (no music 34%, happy music 38%, sad music 38%; F(2, 36) = 1,357; p = 0.263). However, whether people reported a happy face or sad face while in fact there was none was strongly affected by music: the proportion of happy faces reported was significantly higher in the happy music condition than in the other two conditions (no music 40%, happy music 53%, sad music 36%; F(2, 36) = 9.969, p = 0.00036) - see . An additional analysis of all noise images in which observers reported to have seen a face revealed no evidence of any randomly present structure in the noise images, suggesting that perception of faces in this experiment was mainly based on internally generated signals, and not on randomly present features that appeared like a face in the noise stimuli [8].

Discussion

We have shown that in a challenging stimulus detection task, participants' conscious reports about stimuli are not only affected by previous knowledge and expectation, but also by mood. Participants were more sensitive to mood-congruent emotional stimuli, and showed a bias towards reporting false alarms that were mood-congruent in trials in which no stimuli were presented. These results are in line with the earlier discussed studies on the effects of mood on visual processing: observers become more sensitive to facial features that are congruent with their own emotional state [13]-[17]. However, we extend this earlier work by demonstrating that this bias extends to illusory perception: even when there is no real stimulus present, mood affects what participants see.

Mood congruency effects in emotion perception may be explained in two different ways: first, it may be the case that post-perceptual decision processes are biased. In that case, the perceptual representation of an emotional face is not affected by mood - only post-perceptual processing is, for example, by an adjustment of decision thresholds [cf. 20]. However, it may also be that mood affects perceptual processing itself, similar to context-dependent top-down modulation of visual processing [1]-[5]. In such an interpretation, the sensory representations on which a subsequent perceptual decision would be based would be directly influenced by the observer's state of mind.

Our data seems to favour this latter hypothesis. Apart from replicating earlier work on increased sensitivity to mood-congruent facial expressions, we report that observers' reports during false alarms were also strongly biased by mood. Given that our participants were instructed to only report presence of a face when they were absolutely sure a face was presented, it is reasonable to assume these false alarms were truly reflect 'illusory percepts', as opposed to guesses in response to an ambiguous stimulus. Several studies have attributed illusory percepts to 'pure top-down' processing, and indeed report activity in visual areas when participants report to have seen a highly expected stimulus while in fact no stimulus has been presented [8]-[10], [21].

Extrapolating this to the present results, we may assume that top-down modulation of perceptual processing is not just driven by visual context, memory, or expectation. Apparently, emotional state can also influence processing of perceptual input in a top-down manner, and alter the contents of visual awareness, even in absence of structured visual input. Mood dependency of top-down processing would go against the idea that top-down modulations are purely 'predictive' or 'Bayesian' in nature: the mood of the observer has obviously no effect on the likelihood of encountering mood-congruent emotional stimuli. So, what may be the functional significance of mood-dependent top-down modulation of visual processing?

It is interesting to note that recent studies have found modulation of early visual cortex activity as a function of subjective reward value [22]. It is not unlikely that our findings represent a similar mechanism, but now for emotional facial expressions - the 'reward value' an observer attaches to an emotional face obviously changes as functions of that observer's own emotional state. Possibly, such a mechanism aids in fine-tuning the interpretations of others' emotions, respective to our own. A recent brain imaging study has shown that congruency between one's own mood, as induced by music, and a presented emotional face results in a specific pattern of brain activation: congruency activates the superior temporal gyrus, but diminishes activity in the face-specific fusiform gyrus, whereas the opposite patterns is observed for incongruent music-face pairs [16]. This seems to suggest a difference in top-down control in visual face processing when the observer's mood is incongruent with the emotional expression of target faces as opposed for mood-congruent faces. Moreover, disorders in top-down processing of faces have been linked to autism spectrum disorder, suggesting an important role for top-down processing of socially relevant stimuli, such as emotional faces, in social cognition [23]. Together with the present results, these findings suggest that the image in our mind may in part be determined by social cognitive processes, although the exact underlying mechanisms remain unclear.

Conclusion

Our results show that our conscious experience of the world may be less objective than we think. Conscious experience does not only reflect 'what is out there', but also our previous knowledge and expectation [1]-[10], [21]. Our findings show that mood, as induced by music, is also reflected in visual awareness, both in biasing processing sensory input, as in the generation of conscious visual percepts in absence of structured visual input. In other words, the music you are listening to might directly alter the way you perceive the world.

Footnotes

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Funding: This work is funded by the University of Groningen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

References

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Visual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge (e.g., memory) and expectations about what the world should look like. However, perception is not only influenced by previous ...