Music & The Brain

Music & The Brain: Music lights up more of the brain at once than almost any other activity, reaching hearing, movement, memory and reward circuits; it can release dopamine like food does, lodge tunes on repeat, and unlock memories that survive even severe dementia.

Anne Blood: In a 2001 PET scan study with Robert Zatorre, she showed that musical chills activate the same reward regions involved in food and sex.

Valorie Salimpoor: Her 2011 study found dopamine is released twice during favorite music, once in anticipation of the big moment and again when the peak actually hits.

Matthew Sachs: His 2016 brain imaging study found that people who get chills from music have more white matter connections between their auditory cortex and emotional processing areas.

James Kellaris: The University of Cincinnati researcher found that around 98 percent of people get songs stuck in their heads, and that simple, repetitive songs with a small surprise are the worst offenders.

Kelly Jakubowski: Her 2016 study of 3,000 people found earworms tend to be fast, with common melodic shapes and unusual intervals, and Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' topped the list.

Bluma Zeigarnik: The psychologist showed in the 1920s that people remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones, and researchers think the same effect helps explain why half remembered songs loop.

University of Reading: A 2015 study there found that chewing gum reduces earworms, because it occupies the mouth and throat muscles involved in silently rehearsing a tune.

Petr Janata: In 2009 he found that the medial prefrontal cortex tracks both musical keys and personal memories, helping explain why an old song can instantly replay a whole scene from your life.

Alive Inside: This 2014 documentary featured Henry, a nursing home resident with dementia who barely spoke until headphones playing Cab Calloway brought him suddenly to life, singing and talking.

Clive Wearing: The British musician has one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever recorded, with a memory lasting seconds, yet he can still play piano and conduct a choir.

Tony Cicoria: After being struck by lightning in 1994, the orthopedic surgeon developed a sudden, consuming urge to play and compose piano music, a case Oliver Sacks wrote about in 'Musicophilia.'

Frances Rauscher: Her 1993 'Mozart effect' study found only a brief spatial reasoning boost lasting minutes, yet Georgia's governor proposed sending a classical music CD to every newborn in the state.

Gabby Giffords: After a 2011 brain injury damaged her language areas, the congresswoman relearned speech partly through melodic intonation therapy, singing words before she could say them.

Isabelle Peretz: The Montreal neuroscientist has studied congenital amusia, true tone deafness, which affects roughly 1.5 percent of people and makes melodies sound like noise.

Diana Deutsch: She found that music students who speak tonal languages like Mandarin are far more likely to have perfect pitch, suggesting early language shapes musical hearing.

Charles Limb: By scanning jazz pianists as they improvised, he found the brain's self monitoring region quiets down while self expression areas ramp up.

Nina Kraus: Her Northwestern lab found musicians' brains encode speech sounds more precisely, which helps them pick voices out of noisy rooms.

Ernest Mas-Herrero: In 2014 he described musical anhedonia, a condition in which people enjoy food and money normally but feel nothing from music, found in a small percentage of people.

Daniel Levitin: His 2017 study found that blocking the brain's natural opioids with the drug naltrexone dampened the pleasure people felt from their favorite songs.

Hohle Fels Flute: Carved from a vulture wing bone about 40,000 years ago in a German cave, it is among the oldest known musical instruments.

Glenn Schellenberg: His 2004 Toronto study randomly gave children keyboard or voice lessons and found a small but real IQ increase compared with kids given drama or no lessons.

Bolero: Some neurologists have suggested that Maurice Ravel's hypnotically repetitive 1928 piece may reflect the early stages of the brain disease that later took his ability to compose.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: His 2018 analysis of Spotify data found that men's favorite songs were most often released when they were about 14, and women's when they were about 13.

Jorn-Henrik Jacobsen: His 2015 study found the brain regions that store long known music are among the least damaged by Alzheimer's, explaining why patients can still sing old songs.