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INFORMATIONAL ARTICLE

Music and the Brain connects.

FEBRUARY 13, 2015TANISHA CASTILLO

SCHOOL BRÍGIDA ÁLVAREZ RODRÍGUEZ

Table of ContentsTitle Page 0

Index 1How the music affects the brain? 2

Happy/sad music affects how we see neutral faces 2

Ambient noise can improve creativity 2-3

Our music choices can predict our personality 3-4

Music can significantly distract us while driving 4

Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills 4-5

Classical music can improve visual attention 5

One-sided phone calls are more distracting than normal conversations 6

Music helps us exercise 6-7

Legend 8

How the music affects the brain

For many people, music is their only friend. It is there when we are feeling sad, happy, lonely, depressed or any type of emotion. It’s a big part of everyone’s life and well it would be interesting if I showed you how we react to it sometimes.

In the image above we can see how music affects every part of our brain, so we’re only scratching the surface with this post, but let’s jump in. The following points are some facts of many of how music affects our brain. Most of these, if not, all are

positive to our diary life.

1) Happy/sad music affects how we see neutral faces:Our brain can respond in different ways to happy and sad music. There are two types of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions. The difference between them is that we can actually understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which kind of explains why we find sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing.

Music can also affect us at how we perceive happy, sad and neutral faces. There is a study where thirty subjects were presented a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After the snippets, they were shown different pictures. Some people were shown a happy picture, others a sad picture and to others a neutral expression. They were asked in a scale from one to seven, one being sad and seven being extremely happy, and the results were that happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown.  A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces.₁

2) Ambient noise can improve creativity: Moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Apparently, moderate noises gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do.  This is how it works, 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.

However, in high noise levels, our creative thinking is impaired because we are overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

Like Friedrich Nietzsche said:

“Without music, life would be a mistake”

Their results were fairly clear.

A full study describes how researchers conducted five separate experiments to see how noise level influenced productivity and creative cognition.₂

3) Our music choices can predict our personality:Researchers found that people could make accurate judgments about an individual's levels of extraversion, creativity and open-mindedness after listening to ten of their favorite songs.

There were five personality traits used for the test: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability in which, interestingly, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, wasn’t obvious based on musical taste.₃

To break it down, here is the connection they have found:

[Sidebar Title]The picture beside here is also a break-down of how the different

genres correspond to our personality, according to a study

conducted at Heriot-Watt University.

Genres: high self-esteem

creative outgoing gentle at ease introvert hard-working

low self-esteem

Blues × × ×Jazz × × ×Soul × × ×

Classical × × × ×Rap × ×

Opera × × ×Country/Westerns × ×

Reggae × × × × ×Dance × ×Indie × ×

Bollywood × ×Rock/Heavy metal × × × ×

Chart pop × × × ×

4) Music can significantly distract us while driving (contrary to common belief):

Once the first car radio was rolled out there was no turning back. Auto accidents caused by distracted drivers injured an estimated 421,000 people in 2012, and listening to music while driving was a factor in many of those accidents.

A study of novice drivers conducted by found that, when the drivers were listening to their own choice of music at a high volume, they were much more distracted than when listening to different music at a lower volume. Their own music was preferred, but it also proved to be more distracting: drivers made more mistakes and drove more aggressively when listening to their own choice of music.

Even more surprising: music provided by the researchers proved to be more beneficial than no music at all. It seems that unfamiliar, or uninteresting, music is best for safe driving.₄

5) Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills:

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. One study showed 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. They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information

Brain scanning technologies have permitted neuroscientists to observe the activity of living brains, and the results are clear:

Musicians are different.

For instance, in one study, people who played musical instruments as children showed more robust brainstem responses to sound than did non-musicians and have significantly more grey matter volume in both the sensorimotor cortex and the occipital lobes.

Other studies have reported that kids assigned to receive musical training developed distinctive neural responses to music and speech, evidence of more intense information processing that was linked with improvements in the discrimination of pitch and the segmentation of speech.

More recently, researchers reported that 8-year-old children showed enhanced reading and pitch discrimination abilities in speech after 6 months of musical training. Kids in a control group (who took painting lessons instead) experienced no such improvements.₅

6) Classical music can improve visual attention:

The study determined whether listening to excerpts of classical music ameliorates unilateral neglect (UN) in stroke patients. In each condition, participants were asked to complete three subtests of the Behavioral Inattention Test while listening to classical music, white noise, or nothing.

Participants generally had the highest scores under the classical music condition and the lowest scores under the silence condition. In addition, most participants rated their arousal as highest after listening to classical music. The study results are, that listening to classical music may improve visual attention in stroke patients with UN. Future research with larger study populations is necessary to validate these findings.

Because this study was so small, the conclusions need to be explored further for validation, but I find it really interesting how music and noise can affect our other senses and abilities—in this case, vision.₆

7) One-sided phone calls are more distracting than normal conversations:

A study focused on noise, rather than music, showed that when it comes to being distracted by other conversations, phone calls where we can hear one side conversation are the worst offenders. The study was based on tests carried out on a group of volunteers who were asked to carry out anagram puzzles while, unknown to them, researchers conducted a scripted conversation in the background, either between two people in the room or between someone on a mobile phone and an unknown caller.

Those who heard the one-sided phone conversation found it more distracting than those who heard both people speaking. They also remembered more of the conversation, showing that it had grabbed their attention more than those who heard both sides and didn’t remember as much of the discussion.

A possible explanation for the finding is that people find it easier to follow a two-way conversation and so their brains do not have to work as hard in figuring out what is going on.₇

8) Music helps us exercise:

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. The cyclists who listened to music required 7% less oxygen to do the same work as those who cycled in silence. Now if we team up these different “tempos” with the actual work-out we’re doing, we can be in much better sync and find the right beat for our exercise.

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. In the picture above you can see how this breaks down for different genres.

The music apparently reduces the rate of perceived exertion during submaximal exercise. Themusic tends to enhance effective affective states at both medium and high levels of work intensity. The effect of asynchronous music in contributing to optimal arousal is unclear. Despite limited evidence to suggest that sedative music lowers heart rate, and therefore may prolong submaximal activity, the impact of simulative music is unclear.Now if we team up those different “tempos” with the actual work-out we’re doing, we can be in much better sync and find the right beat for our exercise. If you match up the above with the graphic below, it should be super easy to get into a good groove:

As

music can make us happy, it can help us to our daily work-outs, too! ₈

NOTE: If you’re interested in watching a video related to this article, go to: https://youtu.be/wPkuUPOk6kQ

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