Music regulates complex cognitive and sensorimotor responses and can influence our thinking, cognition (including attention and memory), speech and pain management. Teresa Lesiuk, assistant professor of music education and therapy at the University of Miami, believes that listening to music “activates the pleasure center and stimulates a pathway through the limbic system to the orbitofrontal cortex, which is responsible for thinking.”

Most researchers agree that music changes moods and promotes physiological health, but the scientific study of music’s effect on our productivity is still evolving. For example, there is still no consensus on whether all music genres and types of sounds help you focus on your work. In today’s piece, let’s talk about that, as well as how and what kind of music is good to listen to during work hours.

How Does Music Improve Brain Function?

It is usually difficult to tune in to productive work at the end of the day, and begins to irritate the colleague who is talking on the phone, distracting even a minor noise. But this can be fixed with good music. In England, there was a study which showed that a calm, lyrical melody helps to tune the thoughts, improve brain function. Pleasant music relieves stress, calms you down and allows you to put all your thoughts and ideas in order. Let’s take a closer look at how music can increase intelligence and relieve stress.

The Mozart Effect

In 1993, an experiment was conducted in California with volunteers who were asked to take spatial reasoning tests to the music of the great composer Mozart. The test results surprised everyone: those who solved the tests to Mozart’s sonata, got much higher scores than the other subjects. Then Canadian psychologist Glenn Schellenberg recorded several versions of Mozart’s sonata, in slow and fast tempo, and conducted the same experiment. In the end, it turned out that the speed of the melody also affects a person’s productivity. The portion of the subjects who listened to fast music scored the most points; those who listened to a sad, slow tune scored half as much.

Indeed, music can tune in the right way, improve mood and invigorate. It is important to follow the rule – choose the music that you like, and then the effect will not make you wait long.

How Playing An Instrument Helps You Boost Your Intelligence

According to scientific research, playing an instrument and singing contributes to the development of intellectual abilities. Harvard School conducted an experiment among children, some of whom studied music for at least 3 years, and the rest had never played an instrument. They were asked to take tests of visual imaginative thinking, vocabulary and fine motor skills. As might be expected, the young musicians had better results. Playing instruments requires the development of many skills at once, being able to read sheet music and play music, it contributes to vocabulary.

Playing an instrument or practicing singing is much better at developing the intellect than just listening to music. So it’s never too late to start learning a useful hobby that will diversify your leisure time and protect you from age-related diseases. Scientists have confirmed that practicing music can prevent the development of dementia. There is no exact explanation, but we can assume that one reason is the development of several skills at the same time. Or music helps the brain replace some gaps in the brain with other areas. Music also calms and helps fight insomnia, and this is a cumulative effect. It is recommended to listen to classical, calm music that you will enjoy.

Listen to music for your own pleasure, learn to play an instrument and develop yourself. Don’t be afraid to get new hobbies at any age. And if you don’t know what your talent is, that’s okay. Take a free online course called Find Your Talent. From the course, you’ll learn effective ways to identify and develop your strengths. Take the first step toward your dreams.

Why Creatives Need To Listen To Music

Music is not just entertainment that gives rest to the tired mind and stimulus for Friday night body dancing. It’s a powerful brain training tool that requires no conscious effort when applied.

Creative professionals, whether they be content creators, designers, advertisers, artists, commercial writers, or even programmers, listening to music is downright exemplary.

Music exposure can improve brain health even in people with such a terrible thing as dementia (senile dementia, the breakdown of mental function after illness or injury).

In 2020, a group of scientists from four countries conducted a meta-analysis of the many published studies on the topic and found that the therapeutic effect of music for dementia does exist – especially if music therapy is done frequently. Listening to music and singing were the most effective.

Researchers found that music makes the brain simultaneously care about perceiving the sounds, rhythms and lyrics it contains, as well as continuing to listen to the “sound” of the environment. This has been shown to cause widespread activation of many parts of the cerebral cortex and, as a result, improved cognitive (mental) functions.

It also turned out that musical training is a strong stimulus for neuroplastic changes. In other words, the recombination of different neural networks to better adapt to the current situation. Music reduces neuronal degeneration, increases brain plasticity and forces the brain to make new connections.

Frequent listening to music by patients with a deteriorating psyche has helped them fight even depressive states and basically improve the quality of daily life.

Recall that we are talking about people with severe disorders, with a “disintegrating” brain. Let us imagine what could be the power of the impact of music on healthy professionals! And let’s get to the details.

Goosebumps Or Music-Induced Goose Bumps Are Not Toys

A large percentage of people experience a particular bodily sensation: Listening to music, which they really like or are very interested in, can send shivers down your spine and give you goosebumps on your arms and shoulders.

It would be naive to believe that the brain is not involved in this process. However, this involvement has been proven relatively recently. In March 2021, a group of scientists from the Czech Republic, Turkey, Malaysia and Romania published a report on the study, which for the first time confirmed the relationship between electrical activity of the brain and the “goose bumps” that occur when listening to music. And it was estimated and quantified.

Experimenters found that the most significant changes in the electroencephalogram brain were recorded when listening to relaxing music, pop and rock. At the same time, scientists recorded clear fluctuations in the skin-galvanic response (GSR).

It turned out that the brain and skin react synchronously to musical stimuli. And this reaction is particularly evident when the listener switches from relaxing tracks to pop and rock songs.

Researchers have also documented a strong correlation between changes in EEG signal complexity and GSR in response to different types of music.

Attempts to explain how “musical goosebumps” arise, using other tools, have been done before. Several studies have shown that the amygdala body of the brain, it turns out, receives direct signals (or projections) from the auditory apparatus. And this brain department, among other things, is responsible for the formation of autobiographical emotionally colored memories of a person – both good and bad.

It turns out that somehow music directly affects the “emotional center” of our personality. Scientists have proven that complex sounds “pumped up” with emotion invade and change the activity of the amygdala.

It was also found that the intense feelings evoked by music are due to the fact that emotional tracks act on the activity of the adjoining nucleus. This part of the brain is actively involved in the formation of feelings of pleasure, which is the evolutionary “reward” of humans for favorable survival behaviors, and works as part of the so-called “reinforcement system”.

When certain regions of the adjoining nucleus and amygdala are active in the sense of preparing and “delivering” a chemical reward to the brain, the latter (to simplify things a bit) receives a delightful cocktail of dopamine and internal biological analogues of opioids and cannabinoids. Hence the musical “shiver” or “goose bump” effect.

Music is somehow able to invade the holy of holies of the human brain–the chemical laboratories responsible for forming and storing emotional memories, for feeling acute pleasure, and, as we shall see later, for learning all sorts of complicated things. How music information does this is not yet clear, but the fact that it really can is proven quite definitely.

How Music Teaches Us With The Help Of Dopamine And Not Fully Understood Mechanisms

The activity of different areas of the brain is usually recorded by observing increased levels of cerebral blood flow, which can be seen on a CT scan. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to detect the effect of music on those parts of the brain that scientists say are “critical for the formation of reward and reinforcement.

There are many of them: the adjoining nucleus, striatum, thalamus, cerebellum, anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and others. And what is interesting, all of them are involved not only in pleasures and memory, but also in teaching the personality, regulating its goal-oriented behavior, and motivating it to learn and do something.

For example, the adjoining nucleus plays key roles in movement, learning, human impulsivity, human risk-taking behavior, feeding behavior, and sexual motivation. This part of the brain is also involved in processing stimuli and rewards, and especially the unpredictable rewards that good music is so generous with.

As scientists have discovered in recent decades, listening to pleasant music simultaneously triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine (which is also a hormone) and increases blood flow in all of these brain areas. Dopamine is not a pleasure neurotransmitter per se, but is responsible for anticipation, motivation, and goal-oriented behavior that will bring future rewards. And dopamine, as the “anticipation hormone,” powerfully motivates us not only for sexual activity and other pleasures, but also for learning.

Music, intruding into the work of the complex learning system with its specific “carrot”, turns out to be a kind of “teacher”. And it has a noticeable effect on the success of students, even with passive listening. In this case, we don’t need to do anything to get motivated to learn something.

Studies have shown that music activates neural networks, which should not be connected at all to the processing of sound stimuli and musical information. It sort of “goes into someone else’s territory” and powerfully creates remarkable effects there.

For example, it makes the brain activate for spatio-temporal information processing, i.e. it stimulates three-dimensional thinking and helps to successfully mentally locate objects not only in space, but also along the line of time. Incidentally, listening to music has been observed to help with learning to drive.

Researchers have found that learning music, its structure and musical “text,” and playing musical instruments improves people’s understanding of mathematical concepts and computational problems (here we recall the programmers from the beginning of the article).

A strong correlation has been proven between the study of music and how well students do on standardized tests of reading and speaking quality. “Musical” children have been found to excel more vividly in both reading and speaking skills.

When learning foreign languages, music also does wonders. One experiment with English-speaking adults and Hungarian showed that people memorize foreign words better if they are sung, slightly worse if they are given in rhythmic speech, and even worse if they are given in spoken language.

And an important point: active music lessons are not necessary. Simply listening to music passively also stimulates more successful vocabulary learning and improves memory. For example, several fMRI studies have shown that both healthy young and old people learned verbal practices more effectively and memorized information more robustly when music was playing in the background. Learning in silence had worse results.

Gambling Entertainment Contributes To The Dopamine Challenge

Gambling and online entertainment have become increasingly popular in recent years, in part because of the ease of access and wide variety of options. However, these activities can also contribute to dopamine challenge, which refers to the difficulty of maintaining a healthy balance of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps regulate pleasure, motivation, and learning. Dopamine levels that are too high can lead to addiction and impulsivity. Too low levels can cause apathy and depression. Dopamine is a problem because it can be difficult to find activities that provide the right amount of stimulation. Gambling and online entertainment can be particularly problematic because they are designed to be highly addictive, providing constant rewards that keep users coming back for more. As a result, it is important to monitor the amount of time spent on these activities and look for other activities that provide more moderate levels of dopamine release.

Online gambling entertainment also contributes to the dopamine effect problem. We recommend you to look at the List Top 10 Online Casinos gambling games that can entertain you: 

1. Baccarat;
2. Blackjack;
3. Craps;
4. Keno;
5. Poker;
6. Roulette;
7. Sic Bo;
8. Slot machines;
9. Video poker;
10. Sports betting.

All of these games offer the opportunity to play for real money, and many of them also offer in-game purchases that can be used to play with virtual currency. In addition, all of these games are readily available online, making them easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. As a result, they contribute to the dopamine problem by giving people easy access to gambling and online entertainment.

Theories – Why Is This Happening?

Scientists have two main hypotheses. Perhaps they complement each other. Both report that internal factors (such as motivation) and external factors (such as the material to be learned) are important in activating the brain’s encoding and retrieval processes.

There is reason to say that music influences both.

Say, the “dynamic presence theory” claims that music somehow helps structure incoming information and remember it. Quote:

“The melodic and rhythmic properties of music may serve as a pattern that stimulates the formation of internal rhythm in cortical networks involved in learning and memory.”

Allegedly, music, which has a specific temporal structure and eventuality, induces time-systematized fluctuations in human attention, which promotes both temporal and structural integration of information.

The other hypothesis focuses more on musical “control” of mood. And it argues that the positive effect of music on cognitive abilities is due to the fact that it regulates the level of arousal (the higher it is within reasonable limits, the more significant is brain performance) and is also able to reduce depressive mood. There are many studies confirming that mood strongly affects performance during IQ tests and spatial tasks.

There are hypotheses saying that not all music works well as a stimulus for learning and memorizing, but only that which contains a powerful emotional message (and indeed, there is enough moody graphomaniac nonsense in the world that doesn’t give you goosebumps).

Since emotional music, as we found out above, triggers the activity of brain structures crucially involved in the system of motivation and reward, it can directly influence a person’s desire for a reward. And indirectly, on mental performance gains. Quote:

“Music is likely to activate the reward system because of its powerful emotional component, which in turn facilitates a variety of verbal mnemonic tasks, as the reward system plays a huge role in the learning process.”

Studies have found that any emotional environmental sounds trigger activity in a number of brain regions associated with emotional evaluation of what is happening and early emotion processing.

Not only that, but emotional (both joyful and sad) music can influence the level of oxygen in the blood circulating in the brain, which already looks like some kind of magic, because music is intangible.

Listening To Music Has Been Proven To Relieve Stress

In a brutal 2003 study, subjects were put under stress, mimicking everyday adversity, and had their cortisol levels measured after stressful events. One group of participants listened to relaxing music during the measurements, while the other group sat in silence. For the former, as one might guess, the concentration of the stress hormone in the blood decreased faster.

Another study showed that listening to relaxing music reduced heart rate and blood pressure levels, which were elevated due to stress exposure – and also faster than sitting in silence.

Several experiments have proven that music successfully manages emotions by distracting people from unpleasant stimuli. For example, music has a calming and pain-relieving effect during medical procedures. Music has also been shown to help treat tinnitus and attention deficit disorders.

Among other things, scientists have received evidence of the effectiveness of music therapy for affective disorders such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This phenomenon has been attributed to the effects of musical stimuli on the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, which are involved in the formation of the disorders themselves.

A Bit Of A Speculative Summary

Perhaps the amazing properties of music have to do with its very nature. Instrumental music carries no verbal or visual images or meanings, does not hint at anything, does not “say” anything. At the same time, it is physically and mathematically structured in time and as if “in space. It is a part of “physics” and “mathematics” of the surrounding world, but a much more harmonized, slender part.

Our brain likes to classify, systematize, structure and arrange everything in time and mental space. Apparently, when it receives a “meaningless” musical stimulus, it gets involved in a certain resonance with the physical pulsation of music. And it is, in fact, physics – physics of sound, a complex system of structured and harmonized vibrations of the air medium in a wide frequency range.

We can assume that it is the “physicality” of music that makes the brain react to it so powerfully, up to and including chills and goosebumps. And “turn on” so many complex systems, not directly related to the processing of sound signals in any way.

In this connection we can confidently say that professionals in creative industries, who during their work bring to life visual and verbal systems, plots, images and meanings (in space and time), find it very useful to use musical stimuli.

As it seems after all said above, music can create new neural “bridges” within networks and between networks – on several levels. Professional musicians even record the growth of the corpus callosum, the structure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.

Growth and complication of neural networks inevitably leads to the growth of associative, figurative, and semantic connections in the creative personality. And we need all this, because creativity, among other things, is also the ability to create new and complex from old and simple, to connect previously unconnected, to give birth to associations, which no one has ever thought of, to combine unexpected images, techniques and techniques.

Constant training in the subtleties of creative crafts, which can be facilitated by music, is the bread of creatives. Not to mention the fact that many genres require them to be emotional, and music can also help with that.

Whichever way you look at it, music is the creative professional’s best friend. And, by the way, the older a person is, the more it is worth being friends with. After all, dementia is an insidious thing – it creeps up unnoticed.