The Brain and Music

Our brains expect certain melodic, harmonic and rhythmic eventualities! This is a great demonstration of that!

Bobby McFerrin is the brilliant man who wrote “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” In the summer of 2009, he was a presenter at the World Science Festival. Here’s what NPR had to say:

“World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

by Linda Holmes

At the World Science Festival in June, Bobby McFerrin did this demonstration with the audience. It’s a little exercise using a pentatonic (five-note, rather than seven-note) scale, and it’s really something.”

“Zip-a-dee doo dah, Zip-a-dee-ay …”

–A. Wrubel, R. Gilbert

“Do-wah diddy-diddy dum diddy-do …”

–The Moffats

“Super-cali-fragilistic-expialidocious …”

–The Sherman Brothers

“What an odd thing it is to see an entire species–billions of people–playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call ‘music.”‘

–Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

“Music is playing inside my head, I Over and over and over again, My friend, there’s no end to the music …”

–Carole King

Throughout human history and in all known cultures, people have been immersed in music. Humans passionately create, listen to and dance to it. We Americans, most of whom have no particular musical talent, spend hours daily listening to music on car radios and MP3 players, and as background in offices, homes, TV shows and movies.

The fact that music is such an integral part of being human raises intriguing questions, some of which are relevant to MS. Does the brain have specific regions that respond to music? Could people who have conditions that affect the brain, such as MS, obtain therapeutic effects from music?

The neuroanatomy of music

Music is experienced through the simultaneous activation of a remarkable number of brain regions. Listening to music involves two major processes–perception and emotional response. Through perception we recognize music’s physical characteristics–the rhythm, harmony and tone. Our emotional response evokes feelings–sadness, happiness, relaxation and more. The two processes, perceiving and feeling, activate multiple brain regions that are interconnected through complex and vast networks. They range from the front of the brain (frontal lobes) to the back (cerebellum), from top (motor cortex) to the bottom (amygdala), and from outer surface (auditory cortex) to the inner core (nucleus accumbens and hippocampus). Creating or dancing to music activates an even greater number of brain regions.

Importantly, perceiving and feeling music are two distinct processes. For example, there are people who are gifted at perceiving music, such as those with absolute pitch, but who are indifferent to its emotional effects. The reverse is true as well (and is more common)–there are many people who have little or no musical talent, including those who are tone-deaf, who are passionate about music. In other words, you don’t need to be musical to be strongly affected by music and potentially to benefit from its therapeutic effects.

Why do we like music?

“I know it’s only rock ‘n’ roll but I like it, like it, yes I do …”–The Rolling Stones

The widespread activity in the brain that music arouses suggests that music serves a critical role in human existence. Some have proposed that music actually preceded language in human evolution, thus making it a core characteristic or instinct. There is considerable evidence that music is involved in sexual attraction, especially for men trying to attract women. (However, playing the clarinet in my high school band didn’t seem to make me a chick magnet.) Music may, in a more general sense, promote social bonding and may also be important for cognitive development.

Music as medicine: studies in MS and other conditions

“‘Cause music’s been my therapy, Taking the pain from all my anatomy …”–Marvin Gaye

“Music is the medicine of the mind.”–John Logan

It is thought that music may act as a sort of tonic or jump-starter to activate or improve neurological function. MS may be particularly well-suited to respond to music therapy. Each person with MS has a unique collection of brain lesions that produces a unique collection of symptoms.

Music may be capable of accessing diverse brain regions in an individualized way.

Researchers have studied music therapy in MS and other neurological conditions, but most of the studies done so far have had limitations, such as small numbers of participants. Even so, it appears that music might alleviate a remarkably wide range of MS-related symptoms:

* Stress (music may be combined with other relaxation strategies-see Summer 2009 Momentum)

* Emotional problems such as anxiety and sadness, and difficulties with self-esteem, self-acceptance and coping

* Cognitive issues, including problems with memory, speech, or communication

* Weakness, poor coordination and walking difficulties

* Pain

To determine whether music therapy has definite therapeutic effects in MS, larger and more rigorous studies are needed.

What can you do now?

Music therapy is generally safe. The only precaution is that excessive noise (greater than 90 decibels) may increase blood pressure and impair hearing. Although studies of music in MS are limited at this time, music is readily available, and for those who are interested, it is certainly a reasonable approach to try. Music may be pursued on one’s own or by consulting a professional music therapist.

Examples of approaches to try on your own include:

Listening

* Although many people listen casually, it may be helpful to be more thoughtful about the types of music one chooses and to be more attentive to them.

Creating music

* Play an instrument.

* Make simple movements, such as tapping a drumstick, along with music.

* Join a chorus or choir.

* Even if you’re not musical, have a jam session with friends.

Moving or dancing

* Take dancing lessons.

* Just dance or move parts of the body to music.

Additional Information

Two outstanding lay books on music and the brain have been published recently:

* Musicophilia, by Dr. Oliver Sacks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

* This Is Your Brain on Music, by Dr. Daniel J. Levitin (New York: Penguin, 2006).

by Allen C. Bowling, MD, PhD

Suzanne Darley, MA, REACE, reviewed and provided valuable input to this article.

Dr. Allen C. Bowling is the medical director of the Multiple Sclerosis Service and director of the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Service at the Colorado Neurological Institute. He is also clinical associate professor of Neurology at the University of Colorado-Denver Health Sciences Center and author of Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Multiple Sclerosis (2nd edition, Demos Medical Publishing). For more on CAM, visit his Web site, NeurologyCare.net.

Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.

The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements—when seemingly nothing was happening.

Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. Their findings are published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron.

The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

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“In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested,” said the paper’s senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

“I’m not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner,” Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain’s attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

“These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process,” said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers’ knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions—when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician—an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants’ brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a “striking” difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain’s evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change—the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement—activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

“The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music,” said Jonathan Berger, PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music’s underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear—for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony—triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study “may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem—how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations,” said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin, PhD, a music psychologist from McGill University who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.