Music is Good for the Brain
Music is good for the soul, as the saying goes, and most of us are familiar with its influence on our moods. There is, however, a growing understanding of music’s palliative effect on a number of brain-based conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, aphasia, and Alzheimer’s disease, whereby music seems to aid in restoring motor coordination, communication, as well as cognition.
The brain is an exceptionally complex organ, which makes treating neural conditions particularly difficult. Music, however, is an ideal complement to conventional therapies in that it is simple, non-invasive and, at least for most people, enjoyable. Experts believe that listening to music, besides making us feel good, might possibly rewire the brain and find new pathways for neural signals to travel.
According to the National Aphasia Foundation, patients suffering from strokes are encouraged to sing words rather than say them as part of their speech therapy. The treatment, known as melodic intonation therapy, is believed to bridge the divide between the left and right sides of the brain where language and music are processed, respectively. A study published in the journal Brain found that when patients listened to music, their verbal memory and focused attention benefited. Researchers believe that music directly stimulates recovery of the damaged regions while also enhancing parts of the brain that are responsible for pleasure, arousal, motivation and memory.
If you listen to soothing music, studies show that the body's stress levels drop due to a decrease in the stress hormone cortisol. And listening to upbeat music can increase the number of antibodies in your system which are crucial to identifying and eliminating harmful bacteria and viruses.
Music seems to open up our brains for certain kinds of thinking. After you’ve listened to classical music you can do certain spatial tasks more quickly, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle. But the effect lasts only a short time. Our improved skills fade about an hour after we stop listening to the music. It’s thought that the classical music "pathways" in our brain are similar to those we use for reasoning.
Learning to play an instrument can have longer effects on reasoning. Children who took piano lessons for several months were found to have improved their ability to work puzzles and solve other tasks by as much as 30 percent.
What we call classical—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc—is different from most modern music. It has a more complex structure. Researchers think the complexity of classical music is what stimulates the brain to solve these spatial problems more quickly. Listening to classical music may have different effects on the brain from listening to other types of music. But listening to any kind of music helps build music-related pathways in the brain.
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