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Music affects our brain in many ways. This video explains the physiological and physical effects of the brain.

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This video shows the benefits of playing music, rather than simply listening. Scientists use fMRIs to see how the mind and body react to musical cues.

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In this episode of Tech Effects, we explore the impact of music on the brain and body. From listening to music to performing it, WIRED's Peter Rubin looks at how music can change our moods, why we get the chills, and how it can actually change pathways in our brains.

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How Does Music Affect Our Brains & Our Bodies?

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In this episode of Tech Effects, we explore the impact of music on the brain and body. From listening to music to performing it, WIRED's Peter Rubin looks at how music can change our moods, why we get the chills, and how it can actually change pathways in our brains.

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My essay investigates the music's impact on the brain. After all the research, I concluded that music does have mostly positive effects on the brain. It keeps the brain engaged and working at all times.

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Illustrates the process we use to determine our music taste. Our music tastes are dependent on our environment during adolescence. They are almost completely solidified by our teen years.

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We've all been through this scenario. You start playing a song for your friend that you are positive is incredible, only to watch as her face drops in the disappointed aftermath of a too-high anticipation level when the part you said is "the best!" is, to her, mediocre at best.

You will the song to play faster and reach the bridge quicker, but even the triumphant key change doesn't do it. She absolutely hates it and there's nothing you can do to change her mind.

How is it that your favorite band in the entire world, the band that got you through breakups, your parents' divorce and your high school graduation, does not evoke the same wild emotions in your friend as it evokes in you?

How is it that she doesn't get those same chills you get during the chorus or feel the weight of the words' meanings as heavily as you do?

What really determines the music that you -- and others -- come to fall in love with?

If you and your friend grew up in different areas during adolescence, chances are that you'll have different music tastes. Your music taste, it turns out, is almost completely solidified by your teen years.

It is around age 10 that we start to formulate our musical interests, even if we had no prior interest in music.

During the teenage years that follow, self-discovery is in full swing and emotions are heightened, so we are ultra sensitive to all kinds of music.

As a teen, your brain "tags" emotionally-charged, prepubescent moments as important, and whatever music you listen to throughout these emotional times -- the oldies your parents listen to, someone's song on MySpace, popular music on the radio, your older brother's indie jams -- acquires deep meaning and is fair game for shaping your permanent music taste.

Most of this time, especially around age 12, we listen to whatever our friends are listening to in order to place ourselves into a specific social circle. And fitting in the with popular kids in middle school probably meant that you'd better like Britney Spears.

At 14, the wiring of your brain that will determine your music taste almost reaches adult-like completion. At this age, we discover that whole worlds of music and people exist outside the confines of what we know.

We're rambunctious, exploratory and experimenting, and we realize that we don't have to abide by our parents' rules, so we smear on the black eyeliner and listen to System of a Down. We're absorbing information like a sponge, and it all influences our taste.

We end up liking some stuff, we end up hating some stuff.

Think about it. Is your music taste really that different from what it was when you were a young teenager? Maybe a little bit refined, maybe a new genre thrown in here or there, but, for the most part, you likely still get excited listening to that song from your 8th grade dance.

When we hit 18-20, our music taste is essentially solidified. It's not an exact cutoff, but it's pretty close. Researchers estimate that by this age, we've become less open-minded, and our neural circuits become almost fully structured based around our experiences, leaving little wiggle room for new associations.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says it's possible to expand musical tastes as an adult, but, "if we had relatively narrow tastes in our developing years, this is more difficult to do because we lack the appropriate schemas, or templates, with which to process and ultimately to understand new musical forms."

So that's why it took me this long to get into Radiohead.

What's worse is that popular music is subjected to a basic, unchanging formula, and if you grew up on this kind of duplicated music during your teens, you're so indoctrinated that you'll probably hate anything different or unique later in life.

In fact, the concept of "unique" music hardly exists. A study called Measuring Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music reports that new songs are only "new" because they're literally just made to be louder, which tricks us into thinking they're new.

After analyzing over 464,411 music recordings, researchers noticed that melodies and sounds of the instruments used have remained consistently stable, but pitch, sound and loudness changes.

New technologies in mastering and compression techniques have caused songs to increase in volume, while rhythms stay similar.

A song is not new. It's just louder. Your grandma was right.

How you're feeling when you listen to a song can also completely determine whether or not you like it. This correlation is so strong that your brain actually starts to manipulate itself into said emotional state when you listen to the song.

This works both ways, too: Your mood can even influence what music you listen to and your opinion of a song.

Ultimately, however, you can't choose the emotional connection you get from songs. Instead, your subconscious brands a song with imagery, memories and associations with people who you may not have thought about in years -- and there's nothing you can do about it.

And if the imprinting is positive, you'll want more of a similar-sounding song. Hell, even if the imprinting is negative, you may want more. Humans are addictive and masochistic, after all.

All in all, although there aren't extremely clear links between who you are and what your music preference is, people often use one's music taste as an indicator of one's personality.

Studies show that people talk about music the mostwhen they first meet somebody because they believe music taste tells a lot about a person, and in certain cases, it can be true. In other cases, like with my love for Snoop Dogg, I don't think it says too much.

Well, except that I really, really ask you not to judge me based on my love for Snoop Dogg.

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Is This Your Song? The Science Behind What Determines Your Taste In Music

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We've all been through this scenario. You start playing a song for your friend that you are positive is incredible, only to watch as her face drops in the disappointed aftermath of a too-high anticipation level when the part you said is "the best!"...

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Introduces the potential harm of listening to music on the brain. Some types of music can actually have deleterious effects on the brain. Scientists conduct a test by dividing mice into three groups: A, B, and C. Group A gets no music, B gets harmonic music, and C gets disharmonic music. After two months, Groups A and B's neurons normal, while C's neurons were damaged and tangled.

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©Arlene R. Taylor PhD

According to Plato, the kind of music to which humans are exposed to during growing-up years determines the balance of their souls. Aristotle evidently agreed saying, "If one listens to the wrong kind of music he will become the wrong kind of person; but conversely, if he listens to the right kind of music he will tend to become the right kind of person."

If specific types of music have a beneficial effect to the mind and body, it stands to reason that effects from other types of music may be less desirable. There are many positive aspects to music and huge benefits that can accrue from its study. That's the good news. On the bad news side, studies have shown that some types of music can result in deleterious effects to the mind and body.

Sound vibrations acting upon and through the nervous system give shocks in rhythmical sequence to the muscles, which cause them to contract and set arms and hands, legs and feet in motion. On account of their automatic muscular reaction, many people make some movement when hearing music; for them to remain motionless would require conscious muscular restraint.

Carol Torres reports that an artificial neurosis can ensue from consistent exposure to deleterious music, which can influence the autonomic nervous system and disregulate some of the body's rhythms. One research project, conducted by a neurologist and a physicist, divided 36 mice into 3 groups (A, B, and C) and subjected them to music as follows:

* Group A = no music (control group)

* Group B = harmonic music that followed the natural laws of music

* Group C = disharmonic music that did not follow the natural laws of music

The decibel levels of music played for Groups B and C were the same, and all three groups had identical laboratory conditions except for the music differences. At the end of two months, the study was concluded and the brains from four mice in each group were dissected. Researchers found that the neurons (brain thinking cells) of mice in Group C were damaged and tangled; the neurons of mice in groups A and B were normal.

The remaining 24 mice were then trained in a maze situation for three weeks. Then they were given three weeks rest, after which they were returned to the maze to see if they could recall how to run the maze. The mice from groups A and B scored equally well in memory retention; they could recall how to run the maze. The mice from group C could not recall how to run the maze. In addition, they exhibited hyperactive, aggressive, and even cannibalistic behaviors.

A study reported by the Scripps Howard News Service found that exposure to rock music causes abnormal neuron structures in the region of the brain associated with learning and memory. Exposure to hard rock / acid rock music, regardless of gender, has been shown to inhibit the ability of some people's brains to store the studied information correctly in the brain. Rock music was found to increase adrenalin levels in a group of students, while a slow piano instrumental had a calming effect.

In his book, Closing of the American Mind, University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom (in the chapter on music) includes observations based on 30 years of working with students. He says that classical music is essentially harmonic as compared with rock music that is rhythmic. Harmonic music appeals more to the mind and makes its listeners more contemplative. Rhythmic music appeals more to the emotions and makes its listeners more passionate. Bloom indicates that the effect on the brain of prolonged exposure to electrical amplification of rhythmic music is similar to that of drugs.

Joseph Crow, professor at the University of Seattle, reportedly conducted a research project on the impact of rock music on the human mind. He concluded that rock, a form of music based on mathematical formulae, could condition the mind through calculated frequencies (vibrations). It is able to modify the body chemistry and make the mind susceptible to modification and indoctrination.

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Potential Negative Impact of Music - Arlene R Taylor PhD, Realizations Inc

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©Arlene R. Taylor PhD According to Plato, the kind of music to which humans are exposed to during growing-up years determines the balance of their souls. Aristotle evidently agreed saying, "If one listens to the wrong kind of music he will become the wrong kind of person; but conversely, if he listens to the right kind of music he will tend to become the right kind of person."

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Provides many ways that music helps our brain. Music makes us smarter, happier, and more productive. Listening is great for the brain, but playing an instrument is even better.

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Music improves brain health and function in many ways. It makes you smarter, happier, and more productive at any age. Listening is good, playing is better.

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Shows why music holds such an intrinsic value to humans. Neuroscientists explain why we enjoy music using the reward system, or the dopamine system.

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MUSIC is not tangible. You can't eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn't protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn't vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music - or well beyond prized, loved it.

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we're in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.

So why does this thingless "thing" - at its core, a mere sequence of sounds - hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.

More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains - activating subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion. Subsequently we found that listening to what might be called "peak emotional moments" in music - that moment when you feel a "chill" of pleasure to a musical passage - causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain.

When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum - an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well - which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.

The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience. Making good predictions about the outcome of one's actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival, after all. And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct.

To dig deeper into how music engages the brain's reward system, we designed a study to mimic online music purchasing. Our goal was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it.

We used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our listeners' preferences, which turned out to be indie and electronic music, matching Montreal's hip music scene. And we found that neural activity within the striatum - the reward-related structure - was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend.

But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were ultimately purchased compared with those that were not.

Why the auditory cortex? Some 50 years ago, Wilder Penfield, the famed neurosurgeon and the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute, reported that when neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory cortex while they were awake, they would sometimes report hearing music. Dr. Penfield's observations, along with those of many others, suggest that musical information is likely to be represented in these brain regions.

The auditory cortex is also active when we imagine a tune: think of the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - your cortex is abuzz! This ability allows us not only to experience music even when it's physically absent, but also to invent new compositions and to reimagine how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation.

We also know that these areas of the brain encode the abstract relationships between sounds - for instance, the particular sound pattern that makes a major chord major, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive neural responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a chord progression. This is akin to what happens if you hear someone play a wrong note - easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music.

These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we've heard.

So each act of listening to music may be thought of as both recapitulating the past and predicting the future. When we listen to music, these brain networks actively create expectations based on our stored knowledge.

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want - or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better.

In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze patterns and yield expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music move us?

When that answer is yes, there is little - in those moments of listening, at least - that we value more.

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Opinion | Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing (Published 2013)

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MUSIC is not tangible. You can't eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn't protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn't vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music - or well beyond prized, loved it.

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Scientists use EEGs to observe and record a subject's brainwaves activities in three phases; before, during, and after listening to violin music in order to compare the subject's brainwaves reaction during these three phases/conditions.

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Why do we all enjoy music? According to scientists, listening to pleasurable music releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain. Dopamine is also released into the brain when we experience sex, good food and addictive drugs.

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By Philip Ball Features correspondent

Thinkstock

(Copyright: Thinkstock)

No one knows why music has such a potent effect on our emotions. But thanks to some recent studies we have a few intriguing clues.

Why do we like music? Like most good questions, this one works on many levels. We have answers on some levels, but not all.

We like music because it makes us feel good. Why does it make us feel good? In 2001, neuroscientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill University in Montreal provided an answer. Using magnetic resonance imaging they showed that people listening to pleasurable music had activated brain regions called the limbic and paralimbic areas, which are connected to euphoric reward responses, like those we experience from sex, good food and addictive drugs. Those rewards come from a gush of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. As DJ Lee Haslam told us, music is the drug.

But why? It's easy enough to understand why sex and food are rewarded with a dopamine rush: this makes us want more, and so contributes to our survival and propagation. (Some drugs subvert that survival instinct by stimulating dopamine release on false pretences.) But why would a sequence of sounds with no obvious survival value do the same thing?

The truth is no one knows. However, we now have many clues to why music provokes intense emotions. The current favourite theory among scientists who study the cognition of music - how we process it mentally - dates back to 1956, when the philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer suggested that emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it. Meyer drew on earlier psychological theories of emotion, which proposed that it arises when we're unable to satisfy some desire. That, as you might imagine, creates frustration or anger - but if we then find what we're looking for, be it love or a cigarette, the payoff is all the sweeter.

This, Meyer argued, is what music does too. It sets up sonic patterns and regularities that tempt us to make unconscious predictions about what's coming next. If we're right, the brain gives itself a little reward - as we'd now see it, a surge of dopamine. The constant dance between expectation and outcome thus enlivens the brain with a pleasurable play of emotions.

Why should we care, though, whether our musical expectations are right or not? It's not as if our life depended on them. Ah, says musicologist David Huron of Ohio State University, but perhaps once it did. Making predictions about our environment - interpreting what we see and hear, say, on the basis of only partial information - could once have been essential to our survival, and indeed still often is, for example when crossing the road. And involving the emotions in these anticipations could have been a smart idea. On the African savannah, our ancestors did not have the luxury of mulling over whether that screech was made by a harmless monkey or a predatory lion. By bypassing the "logical brain" and taking a shortcut to the primitive limbic circuits that control our emotions, the mental processing of sound could prompt a rush of adrenalin - a gut reaction - that prepares us to get out of there anyway.

We all know that music has this direct line to the emotions: who hasn't been embarrassed by the tears that well up as the strings swell in a sentimental film, even while the logical brain protests that this is just cynical manipulation? We can't turn off this anticipatory instinct, nor its link to the emotions - even when we know that there's nothing life-threatening in a Mozart sonata. "Nature's tendency to overreact provides a golden opportunity for musicians", says Huron. "Composers can fashion passages that manage to provoke remarkably strong emotions using the most innocuous stimuli imaginable."

Sound check

The idea that musical emotion arises from little violations and manipulations of our expectations seems the most promising candidate theory, but it is very hard to test. One reason for this is that music simply offers so much opportunity for creating and violating expectations that it's not clear what we should measure and compare. We expect rising melodies to continue to rise - but perhaps not indefinitely, as they never do. We expect pleasing harmonies rather than jarring dissonance - but what sounds pleasing today may have seemed dissonant two hundred years ago. We expect rhythms to be regular, but are surprised if the jumpy syncopation of rock'n'roll suddenly switches to four-square oompah time. Expectation is a complicated, ever-changing interplay of how the piece we're hearing has gone so far, how it compares with similar pieces and styles, and how it compares with all we've ever heard.

So, one corollary of Meyer's theory is that emotion in music will be primarily culturally specific. In order to have any expectations about where the music will go in the first place, you need to know the rules - to appreciate what is normal. This varies from one culture to another. Western Europeans think simple rhythms like waltz time are "natural", but Eastern Europeans dance happily to metres that sound extraordinarily complicated to others. All of us develop a strong, subconscious sense of which notes sound "right", whether in sequence in a melody, or sounding together in harmonies. But because different cultures use different scales and tunings - the scales of India and Indonesia, for example, don't respect the tunings of a piano - there is nothing universal about these expectations. A jolly piece of Indonesian music may be interpreted as "sad" by Westerners simply because it sounds close to being in the traditionally "sad" minor scale.

This picture also implies that music isn't just about good vibrations - it can provoke other feelings too, such as anxiety, boredom and even anger. Composers and performers walk a delicate tightrope, needing to tweak expectations to just the right degree. Not enough, and the music is dully predictable, as nursery tunes seem to adults. Too much, and we can't develop any expectations at all - which is why many people struggle with modernist atonal music.

All this can rationalise a great deal about why we feel emotions from particular musical phrases and performances. Meyer's ideas have received further support very recently from a brain-scanning study by Zatorre and colleagues, which showed that the rewards stimulated by music heard for the first time are particularly dependent on communication between "emotion" and "logic" circuits in the brain.

But it's not the whole story. Our emotional response to music may be conditioned by so many other factors too - if we are hearing it alone or in a crowd, for example, or if we associate a particular piece with a past experience, good or bad (dubbed the "Darling they're playing our tune" theory).

Underneath all these ideas is the fact that we're not even sure what kind of emotion we're talking about. We can recognise sad music without feeling sad. And even if we do feel sad, it's not like the sadness of bereavement - it can be enjoyable even if it provokes tears. Some music, like some of Bach's, can create intense emotion even though we can't quite put into words what the emotion is. So we'll surely never understand why music stimulates emotions at least until we have a better picture of what our emotional world is really like.

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No one knows why music has such a potent effect on our emotions. But thanks to some recent studies we have a few intriguing clues.

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I conducted a survey outside the DVC library on the afternoon of November 4th asking people if they felt if music changed their mood. All 30 people said music did change their mood.

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Scientists use brainwave spectral analyses to determine the impact of music on the bioelectrical activity of the brain. According to scientists, music that is personally liked by the subjects turns out to enhance EEG power spectra globally and also across bandwidths.

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Our brain is dynamic. It conforms to our every day lives. Music, like other things, affect our brain. Any decision we make increases our neural activity. Our brain determines what we enjoy and what we despise.

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Read 1,725 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narrative...