Understanding Music
Here are some videos explaining the importance of music.
TRANSCRIPT
Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? On the outside, they may look calm and focused, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required. But inside their brains, there's a party going on. How do we know this? Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time with instruments like fMRI and PET scanners. When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks, such as reading or doing math problems, each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once, as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into unified musical experience. And our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along. But when scientists turned from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout. The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly fast sequences. But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? The research is still fairly new, but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. As with any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision, in which the left hemisphere is more involved, with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. For these reasons, 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. Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And, indeed, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions, creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag, like a good Internet search engine. How do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to, say, sports or painting? Or could it be that people who go into music were already smarter to begin with? Neuroscientists have explored these issues, but so far, they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity studied, including other arts. And several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain.
TRANSCRIPT
these days we hear music all the time it wakes us up motivates our workouts keeps us company on our commutes doesn't matter what kind of music it is music itself has the ability to affect our moods and our bodies in all sorts of ways we not our heads we sway dance music and give us chills even make us cry music activates every area of the brain that we have so far mapped in fact there's no area of the brain that we know about that music doesn't touch in some way but what's behind all that what exactly does music do to us to find out I went to a whole series of tests designed to measure my responses to music met some kids whose brains may actually be changing thanks for those hours of learning practice and performing spoke with a therapist who used music to help former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords learn to speak again and got a glimpse inside the brain of a two-time Grammy winning artist while he played all to find out how music affects us so what's going on when we listen to music we visited the USC brain and creativity Institute where I had my head examined literally to try to figure it out I'm gonna go into this fMRI machine a tiny tube will surround me we'll get a baseline reading of my brain and then I'm gonna listen to some music and we're gonna see how my brain responds just close your eyes relaxed and try and get into the music as best you can okay and here's what we saw these are scans of my brain the areas in red are where my activity is above average in blue below average and as you can see there's red activity all over my brain not just in one specific area 25 years ago the idea was that languages on the left side of the brain and music is in the right side of the brain but now that we've got better quality tools higher resolution neuroimaging and better experimental methods we've discovered that's not at all right how does that play out in different regions of the brain when music enters and then gets shuttled off to different parts of the brain it stops at specialized processing units in auditory cortex they track loudness and pitch Tambor and things like that there's visual cortex activation when you're reading music as a musician or watching music motor cortex when you're tapping your feet snapping your fingers clapping your hands the cerebellum which mediates the emotional responses the memory system in the hippocampus hearing a familiar passage finding it somewhere in your memory banks music is going on in both halves of the brain the left and the right the front in the back the inside and the outside so what about a musicians brain it's a play a piece of music engages so many things motor systems timing systems memory systems hearing system there's all sorts of kind of brain activity happening it's a very robust thing to play music I'm Alex Jacob Robertson I'm Nathan Glen Robertson we ask these 11 year-old musicians to tell us what's going through their minds when they play some of the most important things are having good postures getting the note right legato staccato for the violin you need to hold your hand at the right place then you need to have be in tune and then you also have to have not only the right intonation but the right sound and then you also need to have great vibrato there's a lot of things to think about back at USC researchers have been studying kids who play music over the past five years to see how it affects their development the multitasking areas of their brains understandably lit up but they've seen other results too music training over the course of five years has had benefits and cognitive skills and decision-making also had some benefits and for social behavior and we've also seen changes in the associated brain structures did you hear that changes in brain structures they found that the brains of children who have studied music have stronger connections between the right and left hemispheres and that can make them better more creative problem-solvers and then there's a motion you hear a piece like this it's easy to understand why emotions play such a big part in music this song by Camille says song is known as the music for the dying Swan in ballet and while it might move ballerinas to dance it inspires different reactions and others some people get goosebumps chills that weird tingly sensation that you get when a great piece of music just hits you in the right way it's called for song and not everyone gets it but it turns out I do now we're gonna have you listened to some pieces of music when you experience a chill if you do I want you to just press the spacebar so we have an indication of when the sort of peak moments of enjoyment are happening okay Matt sax a PhD candidate a USC wired me up to measure my physiological response so when I'm feeling that kind of emotional connection that has a physical manifestation we'll see what my body is actually doing exactly all right how was that that was that a lot of them we got a wall now full disclosure back in the day I believe the cello which might have something to do with why that particular song affected me nice hair but it turns out the brain doesn't work here too we process the difference between this pathway that connects the auditory regions is on the side of the brain here to the emotional region and we show that the tract actually that connects those two regions is stronger more there's more fibers in that region the people who get shows which means some people's brains might have better communication between what they hear and how they feel the music itself also plays a role in Forshaw sax uses different songs in his lectures to see if students get it I'll say raise your hand when you get a chew and I'll play a piece of music a classical piece and maybe half the people will get it but then he plays miss the Rolling Stones give me shelter have you ever seen the movie 20 feet from stardom backup singers yeah there's a part where they isolate the vocals from Gimme Shelter and I played that at 94 7 people experience chills sort of independent of where I go I have to tell you bring that up made me think about it and I got that little kind of thing at the back of the back of my neck but why would that happen the high-pitched notes that she hit almost sounds like a scream and it's very important and sestra Lee for us to be able to pay attention to a scream figure out what's going on and either run or fight whatever we need to do so how come that manifest is pleasure well it's because our prefrontal cortex the more rational thinking part of the brain kicks in so you realize very quickly after you have this really quick startle reflex that there's nothing actually threatening about the piece of music that you're sitting in a safe space with your headphones on and it's in that reappraisal that we tend to think of the pleasurable response is emerging and whether you find listening to music so pleasurable you get chills or you absolutely despise a song it can produce absolutely fascinating effects in the brain according to Levitan musically enjoy triggers the brain's internal opioid system yes opioid system and just like the opioids that come in pill form these chemicals make you feel good and help you paint and music you don't like well that releases cortisol the notorious stressful but that's not even the half of what music can do in the brain you turn on the when former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011 the left side of her brain was severely damaged leaving her struggling to speak a condition called aphasia but to get an idea of just how powerful musics effect on the brain can be watch this video [Music] that word that she had been struggling to say light came easily and song why would she be able to sing a word when she's unable to say it won't we know about the brain is that the left hemisphere controls language and there are many other parts of the brain that have music access music therapist Meaghan Morrow's job is to help patients use those other pathways to regain language sometimes I compare it to being in traffic and you can't move any further but you might need to exit and take a feeder road to get you to your destination so music is basically like that feeder road to the new destination like a detour so we know that music can help us relearn things like speech by accessing alternative pathways in the brain and learning to play music can help strengthen brain connections but what about making music so me music is like it's the language of humanity no matter where I go in the world no matter if I'm played something it doesn't matter if someone can't speak the language and they're into it they're intimately this is xavier de from Pallas better-known is fantastic Negrito we brought him the UCSF to meet Charles Lim a neuroscientist who studies musical creativity the Dufner is up next to understand how fantastic Negrito his brain works when he's making music dr. Lim had him play one of his songs while going through the fMRI so how did his brain respond the areas that process sensory and motor skills along with sounds lit up you can see them here in red and yellow makes sense right but here's the really interesting part Lim asked him to improvise to see what happens when he's creating something totally original now watch what happens to his brain the areas that were active before the ones that deal with motor skills and sounds are even more active but see how there's way more blue in the front of his brain that's the prefrontal cortex and its associated with effortful planning and conscious self-monitoring and it's blue because it's less active we see that the prefrontal cortex appears to be really shutting down in these moments of high creativity kind of like letting go of these conscious self-censoring or self-monitoring areas that normally are there to help control that output and Lim says it's about more than just letting go you view it from perspective of survival if human beings only could do memorize rote responses we'd be long gone it's not just the thing that happens in clubs and in jazz jazz bars it's actually maybe the most fundamental form of what it means to be human to come up with a new idea so music is so much more than notes on a page it can change the way we think and speak and feel but is there a limit to what science can tell us about music just when I discover the answer to one thing five new questions pop up that are more interesting than the first and I've gained an appreciation for how complex the music making and music listening system is it's not demystified for me at all it's it's more mysterious than ever love the little of the people you [Applause]