New research shows that even sad music can lift your mood, while other studies suggest music can boost happiness and reduce anxiety.
Music affects the brain in many positive ways. It makes you smarter, happier and more productive at any age. Listening is good, playing is even better.
We’re all familiar with how certain pieces of music can change your mood, get you motivated, or help you concentrate.
And now, advances in neuroscience enable researchers to quantitatively measure how music affects the brain.
Their discoveries are exciting, and good news for music lovers.
Music is a fantastic brain exercise that activates every known part of the brain.Music can make you smarter, happier and more productive at all stages of life.Let’s take a closer look at some of the latest findings on the many ways both playing and listening to music can enhance your brain.
Four Ways That Music Affects the Brain:
1. Emotion:- Research indicates that music stimulates emotions through specific brain circuits. We can easily see how music and the brain engage mood and emotion when a child smiles and begins to dance to a rhythm.
2. Memory:-Associates music and memories when we experience emotionally salient episodic memories that are triggered by familiar songs from our personal past.”10 In other words, our own familiar music can reconnect people with deep, meaningful memories from their past.
3. Learning and Neuroplasticity:- Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life, and can be greatly affected by the harmony of music and the brain. According to MedicineNet.com, “Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.”
4. Attention:- The power between music and the mind to hold our attention and showed that peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements—when seemingly nothing was happening. This lead the researchers to theorize that listening to music could help the brain to anticipate events and hold greater attention, just as the listeners demonstrated when they seemed to pay closest attention during the anticipatory silences between musical movements.