Relaxing Music Makes Us More Productive

Relaxing music makes us feel at home and helps us feel calmer and more productive.

I still remember when I first heard the song by Peter Gabriel, “Solsbury Hill.” Something about that song, the lyrics, the melody, made me feel like I had been through a storm. Even now, years later, it still can make me cry.

Who among us doesn’t have a similar story about a song that touched us? Whether attending a concert, listening to the radio, or singing in the shower, there’s something about music that can fill us with emotion, from joy to sadness.

Music impacts us in ways that other sounds don’t, and for years now, scientists have been wondering why. Now they are finally beginning to find some answers. Using fMRI technology, they’re discovering why music can inspire such strong feelings and bind us so tightly to other people.

“Music affects deep emotional centers in the brain, “ says Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University who studies the brain on music. “A single sound tone is not pleasurable, but if these sounds are organized over time in some sort of arrangement, it’s amazingly powerful.”

How music makes the brain happy

How powerful? In one of her studies, she and her colleagues hooked participants to an fMRI machine and recorded their brain activity as they listened to a favorite piece of music. During peak emotional moments in the songs identified by the listeners, dopamine gets released in the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep within the older part of our human brain.

“That’s a big deal because dopamine is released with biological rewards, like eating and sex, for example,” says Salimpoor. “It’s also released with very powerful and addictive drugs, like cocaine or amphetamines  .”

Another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: is the caudate nucleus, which is in anticipation of pleasure. Presumably, the anticipatory pleasure comes from familiarity with the song—you have a memory of the song you enjoyed in the past embedded in your brain, and you anticipate the high points that are coming. This pairing of anticipation and pleasure is a potent combination that suggests we are biologically driven to listen to music we like.

But what happens in our brains when we like something we haven’t heard before? To find out, Salimpoor again hooked up people to fMRI machines. But this time, she had participants listen to unfamiliar songs and gave them some money, instructing them to spend it on any music they liked.

When analyzing the brain scans of the participants, she found that when they enjoyed a new song enough to buy it, dopamine got into the nucleus accumbens. But, she also found increased interaction between the nucleus accumbens and higher brain cortical structures involved in pattern recognition, musical memory and emotional processing.

This finding suggested that when people listen to unfamiliar music, their brains process the sounds through memory circuits, searching for recognizable patterns to help them predict where the song will go. If music is too foreign-sounding, it will be hard to anticipate the song’s structure, and people won’t like it—meaning, no dopamine hit. But, if the music has some recognizable features—may be a familiar beat or melodic structure—people will more likely be able to anticipate the song’s emotional peaks and enjoy it more. The dopamine hit comes from having their predictions confirmed—or violated slightly, in intriguing ways.

“It’s like a roller coaster,” she says, “where you know what’s going to happen, but you can still be pleasantly surprised and enjoy it.”

Researchers call this concept “emotional surprises,” and it’s one of the reasons people love listening to music—it can be stressful and anxiety-producing. Still, music offers a powerful way to calm down. During the study, Esser himself became a subject of research—staff members at his workplace kept track of his movements and recorded his thoughts and behavior.

“They were interested in understanding how music affects the body, especially the brain,” says Esser. “It’s like a drug; when you hear music, it affects you differently.”

from Calm and Soothing Music for Relaxation https://ift.tt/xuLtNgr
via Calming And Soothing Relaxation