What music does to your brain (Part 1)

What music does to your brain (Part 1)

Now, at least, finally science could also prove, what actually was always known by musicians of all nations, that music works like a language and changes our brain radically!

Our brain perceives music almost all day long. Nearly everywhere, at home, on the radio, on the way to work, even at the supermarket – our brain is confronted with music all the time.
Scientists and psychologists investigate in and on the secret of the music – and use this also as therapeutic aid in medicine. Two scientific studies are about to show how our brain reacts if it is put out down music.

What effect has music to our brain?

With the help of a magnet resonance tomography (MRT) the reactions of the brains of musicians were measured during them playing a piece of music. In parallel scientists examined the cerebral activity of listeners during a played piece of music. If one compares both MRT findings so the following statements arise:
Music is comparable with a language. A language that works with emotions instead of common sense.

Charles Limb, a HNO doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Baltimore made the following experiment: a musician was asked to play one practised and one improvised tune. While the musician was playing the improvised tune another musician was asked to join him playing. The results were amazing: If both musicians played together, their brain reacted neurally as in a spoken conversation. Only that no words were spoken – the region which is responsible for the language in the brain, was out of order.

The neuronal effect of Music

Another study of researchers from Finland, Great Britain and Denmark published in 2013 shows how differently our brain reacts on different kinds of music. The scientists examined how the brain reacts to different interpretation of an Argentine tango. It turned out: The human brain never reacts in the same way to different kinds of music. As in a conversation the brain is stimulated by impulses and adjusts and releases therefore different emotional, physical and behavioral reactions.

Every genre and every song releases its quite own map in our brain and shows a unique combination of feelings and thoughts. The video recording of the MRT they took while the experiments shows very exactly how radical reactions to music can be.

Music changes our brain

Indeed, music changes the heartbeat, the blood pressure, the respiratory rate and also the muscle tension.
And music also influences our hormone-household. The sounds work above all on adrenal gland and hypophysis: according to the kind of the music the hormones adrenalin or also Noradrenalin are delivered. Whatever the numerous studies are able to tell us: We need and dear music! We are touched by it and are driven to top performances. Music starts up euphoria inside us and also knows its way directly into the brains reward-centre.

“Something that you cannot describe and just feel – this is music…”
(Source: www.musikmachen.de)