Music and the Brain

Music is the only activity researchers have identified that simultaneously activates every major region of the brain. That fact alone is worth sitting with.

What is it?

Listening to music is not a passive experience for the brain. It involves the auditory cortex for sound processing, the motor cortex and cerebellum for beat prediction and entrainment, the limbic system for emotional response, the prefrontal cortex for expectation and resolution, and the hippocampus for memory retrieval. Playing music adds the motor cortex, somatosensory cortex, and a dense layer of prefrontal planning on top of all of that. No other human activity has been shown to activate this breadth of neural territory simultaneously.

The Mozart Effect, the once-popular claim that listening to Mozart temporarily raises IQ, was never supported by serious replication. The actual research on music and cognition is both more modest and more interesting than the myth.

The Neuroscience

Music triggers dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens in a distinctive way. A 2011 study by Salimpoor and colleagues at McGill University used PET imaging to show that the moments of peak emotional response to music, the chills or shivers people feel during particularly moving passages, are associated with dopamine release in the striatum. Dopamine release began in the anticipatory phase, before the emotional peak, and continued through it. The brain was generating reward from the buildup of expectation and its resolution. Music's emotional power is partly a story about the brain's prediction machinery generating reward from successfully predicting and resolving musical tension.

Music with a strong rhythmic pulse entrains the motor system through neural entrainment, where neural oscillations synchronize with the beat. This is why music with a certain tempo makes you want to move. The motor cortex is literally synchronizing its activity with the rhythm. Research consistently finds that people exercise longer and at higher perceived effort tolerance when listening to music, particularly at tempos that match or slightly exceed their target heart rate.

Music and memory are deeply connected through the hippocampus and autobiographical memory networks. Music encountered during emotionally significant periods becomes tagged with strong contextual and emotional memory. This is why a song can retrieve a specific memory more vividly and immediately than almost any other cue. It's also the mechanism behind music therapy's effectiveness with dementia patients: melodic memory is preserved in the hippocampus long after other memory systems have deteriorated, because music was encoded with unusually rich multimodal context.

Learning to play an instrument is one of the most comprehensively neuroplastic activities a human can engage in. It simultaneously requires precise motor coordination, auditory-motor integration, real-time error correction, working memory maintenance, and emotional expression. Musicians show measurably larger corpus callosum, auditory cortex, motor cortex, and cerebellum relative to non-musicians, and these differences correlate with the duration and intensity of musical training.

Try it this week

For focused work, the research on background music is mixed. Music with lyrics is consistently shown to impair reading and writing by creating competing linguistic processing demands. Instrumental music at moderate tempo may help some people by masking distracting environmental noise. For exercise or physically demanding tasks, music in the 120 to 145 BPM range tends to produce the best performance-enhancing effects based on motor entrainment research.

Benji Lachar

High schooler from Dallas, Texas, writing about the neuroscience behind habits, learning, and everyday life at softreset.blog.