5 Ways Music Activates The Social Brain (M)
Music promotes empathy and communication, lowers stress and helps release feel-good neurotransmitters.
Category: Music
How Listening To Music At Bedtime Affects Sleep (M)
Around two-thirds of people use music to help them sleep, but what if the music is so catchy it causes an ‘earworm’?
Surprising Music Is The Most Pleasurable, Study Finds
The brain’s response to this music is akin to money and food.
The brain’s response to this music is akin to money and food.
Music that is surprising or unexpected sends a burst of pleasure through the brain, a study shows.
The reason is that when listening to music, our brains appear to predict what to expect next — even when it is new.
We have learnt certain musical patterns from our lifetime’s experience of music.
So, when the musician strikes an unexpected chord, the brain’s reward centres light up.
For the study, people were played musical extracts that sounded either pleasant or unpleasant.
When people were surprised by the music, more activation was seen in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain linked to musical pleasure.
Mr Ben Gold, the study’s first author, said:
“This study adds to our understanding of how abstract stimuli like music activate the pleasure centres of our brains.
Our results demonstrate that musical events can elicit formally-modelled reward prediction errors like those observed for concrete rewards such as food or money, and that these signals support learning.
This implies that predictive processing might play a much wider role in reward and pleasure than previously realized.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Gold et al., 2019).
Listening To Music Does NOT Boost Creativity, Study Finds
For more creative insight, it is better to work in silence or with only steady background noise.
For more creative insight, it is better to work in silence or with only steady background noise.
Many people believe that music can enhance creativity, but a recent study finds the reverse.
Instead of boosting creativity, people are less creative while listening to music, psychologists have found.
Unlike background noise, music may distract from a creative task, rather than enhance it.
For more creative insight, it is better to work in silence or with only steady background noise.
The conclusions come from a study in which people took a standard psychological test of verbal insight.
People were given three words, such as ‘dress’, ‘dial’ and ‘flower’.
They are asked to find another single word that can be put with all three to make three new words or phrases.
[See the bottom of the article for the answer.]The researchers then tested three different types of background music:
- Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics.
- Instrumental music without lyrics.
- Music with familiar lyrics.
All of these they compared to the steady, but quiet, background noise you might get in a library.
The results showed that all the different types of music — even instrumental without lyrics — impaired people’s ability on the creativity test.
Dr Neil McLatchie, study co-author, said:
“We found strong evidence of impaired performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions.”
A further study tested if it made any difference if people regularly listened to music while working and if the music put them in a better mood.
The results still showed that for creativity, it was better to work in silence or with a ‘steady state’ background noise.
The study’s authors write:
“To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music enhances creativity, and instead demonstrate that music, regardless of the presence of semantic content (no lyrics, familiar lyrics or unfamiliar lyrics), consistently disrupts creative performance in insight problem solving.”
→ The answer is ‘sun’, making sundress, sundial and sunflower.
The study was published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology (Threadgold et al., 2019).
The Music That Reduces Epileptic Attacks (M)
Listening to the music just once helps to reduce the frequency of abnormal brain activity and seizures.
How Your Musical Taste Reveals Your Personality (M)
We reveal ourselves through our musical preferences and our personalities are also shaped by them.
The Music That Defines Us Forever (M)
Vital turning points and formative relationships are played out to the soundtrack of our teens and young adulthood — never to be forgotten.
The Music That Boosts Mental Energy (M)
How to use music to give your brain a boost.
The Music That Makes Exercising Easier (M)
People walking on a treadmill reported feeling thy were exerting themselves less while listening to this music.
The Brain Recognises Familiar Music Instantly (M)
People in the study were only played up to one second snippets of 100 hundred different songs.
