Does music affect the behavior of adolescents? This is one of the most frequent questions I get when I go out to speak around the country. I think it’s a bit of a rhetorical questions because we know that music is powerful and does affect people’s behavior, but especially people who are unsure of themselves, who they are, and what they really want out of life. This fits the description of many adolescents. When teenagers feel alienated from peers and family, they are more prone to identify with powerful media personalities and do some vicarious living through them. If these media personalities sing violent music with violent, negative lyrics, it is going to take a toll on them and the adolescent may actually commit violent acts under the influence of this powerful “music.”

I think you’ll enjoy what this physician has to say about it:

After some research, I found Rusty. At our first music therapysession, Rusty came to my father’s bedroom, tuned his guitar, and began to sing. I sang along. My father laid on his back on his bed, unmoving. The only time he opened his eyes was to say good-bye at the end of the music session.
“Don’t worry,” Rusty said to me when he saw my sad face, “It can take some time for people to warm up to me.” But I felt hopeless.
A breakthrough came, however, during the second music therapy session. We began with folk songs, but they had no effect on my dad. Since his real love is chamber music, I started to hum the melody to Schubert’s Trout Quintet while Rusty improvised on his guitar. My father opened his eyes. Then Rusty moved into a syncopated version of “Ode to Joy.” My dad applauded.
With each subsequent music therapy session, my father grew more engaged. During the sixth session, several other residents peeked into my dad’s room. “Come in! Come in!” Rusty and I shouted, and the staff rushed to get additional chairs. Soon there were six other elderly residents in the room, singing and clapping. We sang World War II era songs, and two women even got up and danced, holding on to each other (otherwise they would have both fallen over.)
Now, Rusty comes every Friday afternoon. We’ve moved the music therapy out of my father’s bedroom into a common area where we are joined by a dozen other residents. The music transforms them. One woman, for example, is usually so folded into herself that she reminds me of a flat tire. But, when Rusty strummed the tune to “Old Man River,” she straightened up, tilted her head back, and gave a performance as moving as any Paul Robeson could have done.

There are days when conversation is too hard for my father. But I know now what to do. We sing.  Even as a younger man, my father knew the lyrics to only one song, “Home on the Range.” So, we end our visits by singing “Home on the Range” together. There’s an irony in this. My father and I are New Englanders. We’ve never lived on the range or even seen a wild antelope. But, no matter. The song brings us comfort, and we are both at peace.

 More and more people are hearing about our Surgical Serenity Headphones and choosing to use them.  People remember reading about them and know  that they will use them if they are told that they need surgery.  That’s exactly what happened with a customer today and she  will be “practicing” with them over the next few weeks so that she automatically relaxes and calms down when she hears this particular music.

For people who don’t happen to live in Louisville, KY, they are readily available online!  Surgical Serenity Headphones are also being test and several key hospitals around the country and just this week I talked with two more hospitals about research and testing.  There are so many interesting studies that people people are devising for me; studies that look not only at the headphones ability to decrease the amount of pain medication, but also comparing our headphones to acupuncture, and another looking at whether people wearing our headphones and listening to our proprietary music perhaps leave the hospital sooner, thus getting back to their homes and lives sooner as well as allowing the hospital to see more patients.  Lots of good information to be gathered.

As a matter of fact, I’ve sold so many lately that my inventory is getting low so I’ll be ordering another 100 or so soon.  The price on the new ones may have to go up so if you want some, now would be an excellent time!  Surgical Serenity Headphones.

The performer is actually a neuroscientist and had the ability to have a little keyboard created and take it into an MRI machine to show the difference between the brain processing pre-composed music and the brain processing improvised music. What do you prefer?

Jan. 7, 2011 1:17 PM ET

New YORK (AP) — Whether it’s the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.

The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.

Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people’s brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.

While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It’s active in particular circuits of the brain.

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren’t necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.

The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don’t feel chills are also experiencing dopamine’s effects, Zatorre said.

PET scans showed the participants’ brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces. Functional MRI scans showed where and when those releases happened.

Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally arrived.

Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the brain’s limbic system, which is involved in emotion.

The study volunteers chose a wide range of music — from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Debussy’s Claire de Lune.

Since they already knew the musical pieces they listened to, it wasn’t possible to tell whether the anticipation reaction came from memory or the natural feel people develop for how music unfolds, Zatorre said. That question is under study, too.

Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, an expert on music and the brain at Harvard Medical School, called the study “remarkable” for the combination of techniques it used.

While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine system, he said, the new work “really nails it.”

Music isn’t the only cultural experience that affects the brain’s reward circuitry. Other researchers recently showed a link when people studied artwork.

Here’s a great new article from Scientific American: 

By Elizabeth Quill

August 14th, 2010; Vol.178 #4 (p. 17)

There are very few activities for which your birthday suit and a three-piece suit are equally appropriate attire. Music is one of them.

Belting an improvised ditty alone in the shower and performing Handel’s “Messiah” on stage with a full choral ensemble and orchestra both qualify as “song.” Simple or intricate, practiced or spontaneous, individual or collective, highbrow or honky-tonk—music covers the gamut. And though instruments aren’t instrumental, they are welcome and multifarious. Bells, drums, strings, woodwinds, harps or horns can certainly spice up a tune. (Though a Stradivarius may not survive a shower.)

But music’s broad scope doesn’t stop with its production. More fascinating than how people make music (and greater mysteries, perhaps) are why people make it, why others listen and how a beat of any sort can have such a profound impact on the body and the brain.

Coos and ahs exchanged by moms and babies around the globe may form a musical conversation that lays the groundwork for language, some scientists now propose. That notion joins others—including the desire to impress mates and the drive to build social bonds—in suggesting an evolutionary source of chanteys, dirges and ballads. Others see music as a pleasing diversion, and research shows that emotionally charged music—whether moving a person to tears of joy or calling forth memories of a failed romance—appears to activate the brain’s reward circuitry. And while listening to music brings on an emotional rush, playing music may provide a mental boost. It turns out that musical training has benefits to the tune of improved under standing of grammatical rules and sharper auditory perception.

Though music’s tendency to get charged with cultural, religious and emotional meaning may complicate things for scientists seeking its roots and benefits, it’s that same tendency that makes pursuing the “what,” “why” and “how” of music worthwhile.

How many of you have ever participated in a drum circle?  Today drum circles are very popular and for good reasons!  Drum circle are loads of fun, require no prior musical training, require no musical ability and enable you to connect emotionally and energetically with people that you’ve never met before that day.

I first experienced a drum circle when I was a music medicine researcher at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.  A very talented woman named Phyllis Free came and assisted in a toning group I was conducting there and suggested that we also do some drumming!  Because few people had their own hand drums back in 1992, we found empty trash cans and large buckets which we turned upside down.

A local TV station came and filmed the workshop for the 12 o’clock news because it was so unusual in those days…it was actually news.  In 1993, the “Today Show” came and filmed Phyllis and me doing another toning and drumming workshop for medical students!  You can see a clip of this at www.HealingMusicEnterprises.com/clips.html.

If you’d like to understand more about the power of drum circles I have written an ebook that is chock full of information and sounds clips.  To learn more about that, go to Drumming for Health, Wellness and Fun. 

I hope you’ll participate in a drum circle one day!  It’s an amazing experience!