The Psychological Powers Of Music
An EcoChi Vital Abstract
This article was posted April 12, 2017 by ScienceDaily, Materials provided by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
"Music is primal. It affects all of us, but in very personal, unique ways," said Burdette, a neuroradiologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "Your interaction with music is different than mine, but it's still powerful. "Your brain has a reaction when you like or don't like something, including music. We've been able to take some baby steps into seeing that, and 'dislike' looks different than 'like' and much different than 'favorite.'" To study how music preferences might affect functional brain connectivity -- the interactions among separate areas of the brain -- Burdette and his fellow investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Scans were made of 21 people while they listened to music, they said they most liked and disliked from among five genres (classical, country, rap, rock and Chinese opera) and to a song or piece of music they had previously named as their personal favorite. The listeners' preferences, not the type of music they were listening to, had the greatest impact on brain connectivity -- especially on a brain circuit known to be involved in internally focused thought, empathy and self-awareness. This circuit, called the default mode network, was poorly connected when the participants were listening to the music they disliked, better connected when listening to the music they liked and the most connected when listening to their favorites. The researchers also found that listening to favorite songs altered the connectivity between auditory brain areas and a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation. "Given that music preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena and that music can vary in acoustic complexity and the presence or absence of lyrics, the consistency of our results was unexpected," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (Aug. 28, 2014). "These findings may explain why comparable emotional and mental states can be experienced by people listening to music that differs as widely as Beethoven and Eminem. There are probably some features in music that make you feel a certain way, but it's your experience with it that is even more important," said Burdette, who also is professor of radiology and vice chairman of research at Wake Forest School of Medicine. "Your associations with certain music involve many different parts of the brain, and they're very strong. "I find this type of work fascinating, because I think music is so important," Burdette said. "If science can help get more people to recognize what music does to and for us, great." Burdette additionally has deep interest, if not direct involvement, in music's clinical applications. "Music isn't going to cure anything, but it definitely can play a therapeutic role," he said.
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