“Turns out, whether it’s rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, hip-hop or classical, your gray matter prefers the same music you do.  It depends on your personal background.  For a while, researchers believed that classical music increased brain activity and made its listeners smarter, a phenomenon called the Mozart effect. Not necessarily true.  In recent studies, they’ve found that people with dementia respond better to the music they grew up listening to.  If you play someone’s favorite music, different parts of the brain light up.  That means memories associated with music are emotional memories, which never fade out — even in Alzheimer’s patients, depending on its severity.”.

University of Central Florida (https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music) –  neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya and world-renowned violinist Ayako Yonetani — have been teaching one of the most popular courses in The Burnett Honors College. “Music and the Brain”.

STRESS

Another factor in music’s ability to reduce pain likely stems from its competition for our attention. “If you’re thinking about something else, then you’re not thinking about your pain, and you feel less pain,” says psychologist David Bradshaw, who studies pain relief at the University of Utah’s Pain Research Center.  Bradshaw’s research shows that the more actively engaged a person is in music, the less pain they feel. For instance, a group of non-musicians asked to listen for errors in a musical passage reported less pain when receiving small electric shocks than those who passively listened to the music. 

Other work out of Bradshaw’s lab suggests that certain personality factors, such as a propensity toward anxiety or the ability to become easily absorbed in activities, may lead individuals to experience greater relief from engaged music listening. These findings suggest that physicians should consider patients’ personalities when recommending pain treatment programs. 

Listening to a song can have a real effect on various parts of the brain, with studies showing that areas responsible for aspects, such as memory and vision, can ‘light up’ in response to music.

“There’s a very wide range of reactions in the body and mind to music, and brain imaging studies have shown that various parts of the brain may be activated by a piece of music.”,  says Dr Victoria Williamson, lecturer in psychology at Goldsmith’s College, London.

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‘For example, a recent study in Canada showed that there’s a real causal relationship between music and the reward system, a core part of the brain that reacts to stimuli, which are good for us – food, light, sex for example – and reinforces these behaviors meaning that we do them more.’

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal showed that listening to pleasurable music of any description induced ‘musical chills’, which triggered the release of the feel-good chemical dopamine.

“We all know from our own individual experiences that listening to music can affect mood”, says Bridget O’Connell, head of information at the mental health charity Mind.

Music may even be able to help you concentrate.

A new ‘digital tonic’ called Ubrain, which can be downloaded onto smartphones, claims to be able to help people focus, energise, wake up as well as relax.

The process uses two different beats in each ear to create a third ‘perceived’ beat (a binaural beat), which can stimulate certain activity in the brain.

“By helping the brain cortex to generate specific brain waves, we can induce different states of alertness, depending on what we aim to do”, explains Paris-based clinical psychologist Brigitte Forgeot.

If we’re feeling anxious or stressed, we can encourage our cerebral cortex to produce slow alpha-frequency brain waves, while on the other end of the scale, if we help our cortex to produce faster beta waves, we will be better equipped to concentrate and focus our attention on a fairly lengthy task.

FOCUS

Music may even be able to help you concentrate.

A new ‘digital tonic’ called Ubrain, which can be downloaded onto smartphones, claims to be able to help people focus, energise, wake up as well as relax.

The process uses two different beats in each ear to create a third ‘perceived’ beat (a binaural beat), which can stimulate certain activity in the brain.

“By helping the brain cortex to generate specific brain waves, we can induce different states of alertness, depending on what we aim to do”, explains Paris-based clinical psychologist Brigitte Forgeot.

If we’re feeling anxious or stressed, we can encourage our cerebral cortex to produce slow alpha-frequency brain waves, while on the other end of the scale, if we help our cortex to produce faster beta waves, we will be better equipped to concentrate and focus our attention on a fairly lengthy task.

PREVENTION OF DISEASE by increasing the immunity through music—AMAZING!

Can listening to music actually help prevent disease? Some researchers think so.

Wilkes University researchers looked at how music affects levels of IgA — an important antibody for our immune system’s first line of defense against disease. Undergraduate students had their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of exposure to one of four conditions — listening to a tone click, a radio broadcast, a tape of soothing music or silence. Those students exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA than any of the other conditions, suggesting that exposure to music (and not other sounds) might improve innate immunity.

Another study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that listening to Mozart’s piano sonatas helped relax critically ill patients by lowering stress hormone levels, but the music also decreased blood levels of interleukin-6 — a protein that has been implicated in higher mortality rates, diabetes and heart problems.

According to a 2013 meta-analysis, authors Mona Lisa Chanda and Daniel Levitin concluded that music has the potential to augment immune response systems, but that the findings to date are preliminary. Still, as Levitin notes in one article on the study, “I think the promise of music as medicine is that it’s natural and it’s cheap and it doesn’t have the unwanted side effects that many pharmaceutical products do.”

FOR THE DISEASED PATIENTS

Music can actually have a significant positive impact on patients with long-term illnesses, such as heart disease, cancer and respiratory conditions (Home, in nursing homes, hospitals, the office, etc…)

Numerous trials have shown that music can help lower heart rate, blood pressure and help relieve pain, anxiety and improve patient quality of life.

“Music can be incredibly useful for somebody who is in a situation where they have lost a lot of control from their external environment – say they are in hospital for a long period of time with a serious illness and less able to move around,” says Dr Williamson.

‘It can give them a sense of control back, as well as creating a calm personal atmosphere and blocking out some of the disturbances around the patient.

According to sports researchers Peter Terry and Costas Karageorghis, “Music has the capacity to capture attention, lift spirits, generate emotion, change or regulate mood, evoke memories, increase work output, reduce inhibitions and encourage rhythmic movement — all of which have potential applications in sport and exercise.”

MUSIC IS AMAZING ON OUR HUMAN BODY REGARDING OUR HEALTH!! WHAT A GREAT MEDICINE!!

“Playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum — the bridge between the two hemispheres — allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings.”

Brain Pickings (www.brainpickings.org)

Pain relief with a pain relieving nature-MUSIC.

The improvement of physical wellbeing through music isn’t only about perceived pain relief. Studies show that playing music for patients before, during, and after medical procedures can help lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety and stress, ease muscle tension, and more.  At the Chronic Pain Care Center at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, music therapy is part of the array of techniques that patients learn to help control their pain, according to osteopathic physician Steven Stanos, medical director of the center. As Stanos sees it, there is no reason not to take time to listen to music.  “What we’ve learned from our pain patients is that any intervention that can be distracting, relaxing, and enjoyable — whether it’s music or another therapy — can decrease the experience of pain,” Stanos says. 

Listening to a song can have a real effect on various parts of the brain, with studies showing that areas responsible for aspects, such as memory and vision, can ‘light up’ in response to music.

‘There’s a very wide range of reactions in the body and mind to music, and brain imaging studies have shown that various parts of the brain may be activated by a piece of music,’ says Dr Victoria Williamson, lecturer in psychology at Goldsmith’s College, London.

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‘For example, a recent study in Canada showed that there’s a real causal relationship between music and the reward system, a core part of the brain that reacts to stimuli, which are good for us – food, light, sex for example – and reinforces these behaviors meaning that we do them more.’

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal showed that listening to pleasurable music of any description induced ‘musical chills’, which triggered the release of the feel-good chemical dopamine.

Music so impacting to our brain that music is even considered having a pain-relieving nature, scientists are exploring how the brain processes music during pain. Look at when we go to the doctor or better the dentist. More are less out to go to the dentist as opposed to the MD since a doctor’s visit doesn’t include the day of the visit or soon later a drill going in out mouth to take care of a cavity or worse Root Canal Surgery, you get the picture. Remember when you have or if you still do regularly go to the dentist there is always soft music in the background. This is because it calms the body through how the brain reacts to soft music as opposed to hard rough music.

When the body encounters something painful — you step on a tack or having a drill applied to a cavity with no novacaine if allergic or the patient just refuses the medication, for instance — electrochemical signals travel from the site of the injury to the spinal cord and on to the brain. There, several brain regions work together to process pain signals — ultimately resulting in the conscious experience of, “Ow, that hurts!” In contrast, brain scans reveal that listening to pleasing music increases activity in parts of the brain’s reward center. 

“Pleasant music triggers the release of the brain chemical dopamine,” explains Robert Zatorre, of McGill University, who studies emotion and music. This change “is strongly associated with other rewarding and motivating stimuli, such as food, sex, and certain addictive drugs,” Zatorre adds. Scientists believe that music’s ability to make you feel good may be one way it helps to alleviate pain.

PLEASING TUNES = RELIEVING PAIN

Studies also suggest that how good a song makes you feel affects your perception of pain. Although musical taste is subjective, there are common features of music that evoke fairly universal responses. For instance, most people find musical consonance (harmonies or chords) to be pleasant and dissonance (clashing notes) to be unpleasant.

When scientists asked study volunteers to evaluate pain while they listened to different types of music, researchers found that people who listened to excerpts of music judged by most to be pleasant (such as the Romantic music piece “The Blue Danube Waltz“) reported less pain than those who listened to unpleasant music (such as Steve Reich’s modern classical piece “Pendulum Music“). The more pleasing the listeners found the music to be, the less pain they felt. 

Other studies suggest that music can interfere with pain signals even before they reach the brain — at the level of the spinal cord. In these studies, scientists examine how different types of music change the withdrawal reflex: an involuntary organized entirely in the spinal cord. 

In one study, scientists measured how forcefully volunteers withdrew their feet after being mildly electrically zapped on an ankle as they listened to music. Compared with pleasant music, unpleasant music resulted in stronger leg reflexes and greater reports of pain. 

Psychologist Mathieu Roy, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who conducted the study, says these results suggest that music can prevent the transmission of pain signals from the spinal cord to the brain.

“The idea that music can heal the soul or “soothe the savage breast” is well-known. Music’s healing power over the body has also attracted attention from scientists who aim to test this ancient wisdom. A growing body of research supports the claim that music can alleviate physical pain. Studies have shown music to be an effective pain reliever, both on its own and as an adjuvant in connection with other types of therapy. Long-term studies of music therapy in pain management have shown it to be associated with improved quality of life and reduced consumption of pain relievers.”

Jeanette Bicknell Ph.D.  Psychology Today

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn’t just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music. Even short pieces of happy or sad music can affect us.

When we hear a form of music we actually match the tone of the music with our mood or reaction to it. This means that sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music to enjoyable, rather than depressing or sad to others.

We all like to pump up the tunes when we’re powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.

It turns out that a moderate level of noises is the sweet level for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise does.

The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.

In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

This is very similar to how temperature and lighting can affect our productivity, where paradoxically a slightly more crowded place can be beneficial.

Of course, generalizing based on some studies is very hard. However looking at the science of introverts and extroverts, there is some clear overlap showing the following:

To break it down, here is the connection they has been found about people (again remember this is generally speaking):

• Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease

• Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing and at ease

• Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease

• Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing

• Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle

• Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing

• Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle and at ease

• Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle

• Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle

• Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing

• Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease

• Chart pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease

• Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease.  Playing music expands our thinking. We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it’s actually useful in more ways than we might expect.  Studies have shown that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.
• Instrument playing is a form of exercise that is great for your health as opposed to sitting watching t.v. where no creativity or imagining or brain concentrating takes place.
• It seems that unfamiliar, or uninteresting, music is best for safe driving. Reason: Less Distracted.

Research on the effects of music during exercise has been done for years. In 1911, an American researcher, Leonard Ayres, found that cyclists pedaled faster while listening to music than they did in silence.

This happens because listening to music can drown out our brain’s cries of fatigue. As our body realizes we’re tired and wants to stop exercising, it sends signals to the brain to stop for a break. Listening to music competes for our brain’s attention, and can help us to override those signals of fatigue, though this is mostly beneficial for low- and moderate-intensity exercise. During high-intensity exercise, music isn’t as powerful at pulling our brain’s attention away from the pain of the workout.

Not only can we push through the pain to exercise longer and harder when we listen to music, but it can actually help us to use our energy more efficiently. A 2012 study showed that cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence.

Some recent research has shown that there’s a ceiling effect on music at around 145 bpm, where anything higher doesn’t seem to add much motivation, so keep that in mind when choosing your workout playlist.

We all have a genre; for those wondering what is that actually it is a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content

“The kind of music one listens to determines one’s reaction to it. No genre is harmful, but there is a preferable choice in different situations. For instance, studies have found that percussion stimulates the left side of the brain, so if one were solving Mathematics problems, or having to reach a logical conclusion, that music would be beneficial. Similarly, for an artiste, instrumental music or Soul would work better,” explains Khurana.

According to Dr Shaan Manohar, ENT specialist, Nanavati Hospital, “Japan has done a study on applying music to water as it freezes and check the patterns of crystals formed. It was concluded that loud drumbeats and music with violent poetry tend to have a destructive effect on the crystals versus Classical music, soft love tracks or devotional lyrics had an enhancing effect on the crystal formation. Loud drumbeats are also known to interfere with the pace of the heart in the very young and the elderly. It is a known fact that listening to Classical music enhances the mathematical ability of a growing child. Also, chanting helps release endorphins in the body creating a calm person, full of positive energy.”

“Your stroke treatment begins the moment emergency medical services (EMS) arrives to take you to the hospital. Once at the hospital, you may receive emergency care, treatment to prevent another stroke, rehabilitation to treat the side effects of stroke, or all three.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)