Brain Rule #10
Study or listen to boost cognition.
HENRY DRYER IS A 92-year-old dementia patient living in an assisted living center. Henry sits alone in a wheelchair in the middle of a room, eyes downcast, face empty. His body seems vacant too. In the documentary film featuring him, Henry is described by famed neurologist Oliver Sacks as “inert, maybe depressed, unresponsive, and almost unalive.” Henry has barely spoken to anyone in the decade he’s lived at the center. This is not how he used to be, his daughter relates. Henry was outgoing for most of his life, blessed with a passionate love affair for the Bible and for dancing and singing. It was not unusual for him to spontaneously burst out into song in public.
On this day, Henry is part of a project helping elderly people reconnect by listening to music they love. Henry is given an iPod loaded with music. As soon as Henry hears the music, Henry starts making a noise like a horn. Suddenly, Henry’s eyes grow wide. His face instantly lights up, a bit contorted. Henry grabs his wrists and starts swaying, smiling, and singing. Henry becomes alive.
When the iPod is turned off, Henry doesn’t slink back into silence. He becomes articulate, funny and very enthusiastic. “Do you like music?” someone asks off-camera. Henry answers, “I’m CRAZY about music. You play beautiful music. Beautiful sounds!” “What was your favorite music when you were young?” Cab Calloway, Henry responds, then starts scatting. He sings, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” with accurate pitch, wonderful emotion, and occasionally correct lyrics.
He is asked “What does music do to you?” Face still animated, arms now gesticulating with purpose, Henry responds: “It gives me the feeling of love. Romance! I figure right now the world needs to come into music, singing, you’ve got beautiful music here. Beautiful. Lovely. I feel a band of love!”
Dr. Sacks is delighted. “In some sense Henry is restored to himself,” he enthuses. “He has remembered who he is, and he’s reacquired his identity for a while through the power of music.” I barely heard Dr. Sacks, because I started tearing up. It’s one of the most moving videos I’ve ever seen.
How does music light up the brain, as it clearly did for Henry? What effects does it have on young and old? What does listening to music do to the brain, compared with being trained in music? Scientists have intensively investigated these questions. In asking whether exposure to music produces benefits in nonmusical cognitive domains, scientists have looked at academic areas, like reading and math. They’ve looked at general intelligence. They’ve studied the effects of music on speech, physical development, and mood. And now we think we have an understanding of at least some of the effects of music on cognition.
Why “think” instead of “know”? Music research is complicated—starting with the fact that not everyone agrees what music is, or why it exists.
Scientists aren’t sure how the brain defines music, in part because there is no universal agreement about exactly what music is. What may be annoying, unorganized, environmental noise to a person raised in culture A at time point A might be rapturous, organized, beautiful music to a person raised in culture B at time point B. For example, in 1971, George Harrison of The Beatles organized a benefit concert, called The Concert for Bangladesh, with sitar master Ravi Shankar. Shankar tuned his instrument before performing, an event heard over the loudspeakers by the mostly Western audience. The crowd clapped and cheered with wild enthusiasm. As they began to settle, Ravi addressed them: “Thank you. If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.” Rap is another example. It is clearly speech and also clearly—what? Music? Generations don’t agree. Neither do composers. Neither do sociologists. One professor of music and science at Cambridge defines music this way: “Musics (yes, the author said musics) can be defined as those temporally patterned activities, individual and social, that involve the production and perception of sound and have no evident and immediate efficacy or fixed consensual reference.” That’s not exactly the way everyone would describe music. The definition of music has been so tough to determine that neuroscientist Seth Horowitz, in his book The Universal Sense, titled a chapter “Ten Dollars to the First Person who Can Define ‘Music’ (and Get a Musician, a Psychologist, a Composer, a Neuroscientist and Someone Listening to an iPod to Agree . . .).”
And yet, at some level, we all know what music is, as did our ancestors. Music has tempo, changes in frequency, and something we call timbre (the quality that separates the “sound” of a sitar from the “sound” of a violin, for example). It is often associated with movement, such as dancing. It is a real phenomenon, even if it is elusive to define.
Some scientists think we are born musical. You can certainly watch babies respond to music, swaying and responding with glee to specific intervals. They even love it when parents talk to them in musical speech called “parentese,” which is rhythmic and high-pitched, with long, drawn-out vowels. Music has been a part of the cultural expression of virtually every culture ever studied. It may even extend into prehistoric times. A 35,000-year-old flute made from bird bone has been discovered, to cite just one example. If every culture has some form of musical expression, and if babies so readily respond to it, some scientists say, music must serve some evolutionary function. We must be hardwired for music, with regions in the brain specifically devoted to music.
Harvard professor Steven Pinker begs to differ. “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties,” he writes in How the Mind Works. Like music, people love cheesecake, and they have for a very long time (a recipe for cheesecake was found around 5th century BCE). But that doesn’t mean the brain has a region specifically dedicated to cheesecake. We are hardwired to respond not to cheesecake specifically, Pinker says, but to fats and sugars. These major energy boosters were somewhat rare in the lean world of the Serengeti. Because of their scarcity, our brains became sensitized—dedicated, you might say—to detecting the presence of fats and sugars. Because of their value, our brains rewarded their consumption with a powerful jolt of pleasure. Pinker makes a similar argument for music. He thinks music stimulates specific regions in the brain that are actually hardwired to process nonmusical inputs. There is no reason to go after evolutionary arguments that explain dedicated musical modules in the brain, Pinker posits, for a very practical reason: there are none.
So the matter is unsettled on why music exists, and scientists don’t agree on how to even define music. Still, researchers forge ahead with studies on cognition and social skills. They’ve discovered fascinating ways that music may benefit the brain. The benefits just aren’t the ones that the average person thinks they are.
What music training does for the brain
Ray Vizcarra was an award-winning music and band teacher in a Los Angeles high school. He took kids who had no musical training, and he whipped them into shape with such skill, and such speed, that the kids were soon winning all-city contests. That’s saying something, given that Los Angeles is ground zero for musical contests. The LA City Council singled him out for a special honor in 2011. And then he lost his job. In a round of budget cuts and layoffs, he didn’t have enough seniority to stay. The story was written up in the Los Angeles Times.
Most of my wife’s friends are professional musicians, and they were outraged. They saw his layoff as one more sad example of music falling to the wayside now that schools emphasize standardized tests, which favor reading and math. Invariably, the conversation turned to questions about the value of keeping music in schools. Doesn’t music help improve test scores in reading and math? they ask me.
My response is not what they expect.
“It’s not a simple story,” I usually respond. Then I start listing the variables. When they say “music,” do they mean listening to music all the time? Or do they mean music training, like what the band teacher did with his students? Both involve exposure to music but are hardly the same thing. Does “help” mean changing an SAT score? How about cognitive processes not generally covered by standardized tests; do those count?
Usually they’re talking about the effect of music lessons on reading ability, math scores, or intelligence in general. And in that case, I have bad news—made worse because I first need to spend a few minutes giving a statistics lesson. The lesson centers around something called an r value.
An r value is a quantifiable linear association between two variables. It measures the tightness of their relationship. R values are assigned a number between -1 and 1. As an r value gets closer to 1, there is an increasingly positive relationship between the two variables. My wife, to give one example, loves chocolate. Every time she eats it, she breaks out into a big smile. The relationship between chocolate and smile is tight. We could easily assign it an r value of 1.
In science, we use r values when reviewing multiple investigations done over a period of years to look for patterns—called a meta-analysis. That’s usually the kind of study done to analyze whether music is associated with a boost in academic or cognitive performance. Let’s look at the actual results in a few areas rumored to be true.
Music training improves math scores. The best score in the literature gives the association an r value of 0.16. That’s not much.
Music training improves reading ability. This sports an r value of about 0.11. In more recent studies, researchers are beginning to detect improvement in reading skills of musicians compared to nonmusicians, but more research is needed.
Music training improves IQ. The answer again is no. Musicians are smarter, but the reason may be that smarter people take music lessons.
Music training improves something useful for academics, right? Yes: spatiotemporal reasoning. That’s the kind of reasoning that allows you to, among other things, rotate three-dimensional images in your head. This is the kind of skill used by an architect or engineer. There’s an r value of 0.32 between the two if you take group instruction in piano, 0.48 if you take individual lessons.
This is not an impressive track record, taken together.
Nonetheless, r values even lower than these can make headlines. One of my favorite examples is the so-called Mozart Effect. Listening to Mozart, the news stories claimed, will improve your ability to do math. An entire cottage industry grew up around this phenomenon, selling DVDs and CDs marinated in Mozart, then marketed to anxious parents worried about their child’s cognitive development. At one point, the governor of Georgia issued classical music CDs to the parents of every newborn in the state. The basis of all this enthusiasm was a tiny little paper that got a giant dollop of publicity because it was published in the prestigious journal Nature. The paper showed that when undergraduate students listened to 10 minutes of Mozart just before taking spatial tests, their scores improved. The boost was not strong, and the statistical analysis was even less so. The r value was a miserable 0.06. Nature issued a critique of the paper a month later, questioning the finding. Scientists who tried to replicate the results found that any pleasurable listening (or reading) experience had the same effect—one lasting about 15 minutes. But that not-so-shiny fact generated almost no publicity. The lead author of the original study has denounced the cottage industry, and years later reflected that the money Georgia’s governor appropriated for the music CDs might have been better spent on music education in the public schools.
That study was published more than 20 years ago. But even when I lecture on brain science today, I encounter people who think classical music is good for your brain. Happily, music does do the brain some good. First we’ll look at the effects of taking music lessons, and then the effects of listening to music.
Musicians are better listeners
Let’s say you are in a lab listening to some audio that is familiar and predictable. All of a sudden the scientist inserts some change into the sound you are hearing (a rhythmic pattern change, or a pitch change, for example). This alteration could be dramatic or subtle, but the scientist is interested in one question: Did you detect it? The more subtle the change you can detect, the higher your score is.
Musicians score better than nonmusicians on such tests. But here’s the interesting thing. They also score better when the audio being played is speech, not music. For example, musicians show more robust neurological stimulation than nonmusicians to the frequency changes of their native tongue. Musicians also are better able to pick out and pay attention to a specific sound in a roomful of distracting noises. (The fancy name for this is auditory stream segregation.)
Music training boosts language skills
In one study, researchers gave children twice-weekly music lessons for a school year, using “a music curriculum designed to teach prereading and writing skills.” The children’s neuroarchitecture changed in a way that boosts both motor skills (writing) and auditory skills (word recognition)—direct improvements in language processing. Ten-year-olds who have been practicing a musical instrument for at least three years see a boost in both their vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills over children who don’t. Kids who start music lessons prior to first grade show superior sensory-motor integration when they are adults. These findings alone make a strong case for parents starting music lessons before age 7.
Musical training provides direct improvements in working memory, not only in the phonological loop but also in the visuospatial sketch pad (see the Miguel Najdorf story in the Memory chapter for more on that). Working memory is a key constituent of executive function. Executive function predicts students’ future undergraduate performances better than their SAT scores, or even their IQs. Selecting and focusing on relevant stimuli from a host of choices is also a component of executive function. Any assistance music provides in this domain (and helping students pick out specific auditory streams in a room filled with irrelevant noise is one big example) is probably a good thing for kids.
Taken together, these studies make a case for supporting music education. In the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, researchers Nina Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran write of the studies on listening: “The beneficial effects of music training on sensory processing confer advantages beyond music processing itself. This argues for an improvement in the quality and quantity of music training in schools.”
Music to Ray Vizcarra’s ears, no doubt.
The link between speech and music
Why would music training benefit speech? We know that music and speech are not processed identically in the human brain. But we also know they share many common features.
Take rhythm, for one. People can speak in a pulsed pattern, as when reading a Shakespearean play, or a poem, or a rap. As any drummer will tell you, rhythm is very much a part of the musical experience, too.
Take pitch, for another. When people are finished speaking a sentence, the pitch of their voice invariably lowers. When people ask a question, their voice invariably rises. Pitch variation is a key part of speech. It is also one of the signature hallmarks of music.
Music processing in the brain may, I believe, be conceptually likened to a Venn diagram, where two circles partially overlap to create a shared region. The brain has regions that are speech-specific. Call it the red domain. And the brain has regions that are music-specific. Call it the blue domain. But speech and music also share some regions in common—psychologically and physiologically. With apologies to Alice Walker, color it purple.
The brain keeps its separate regions quite separate, as we know from cases like Monica, a Canadian nurse who suffers from a condition called congenital amusia. Monica can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Neither can many members of her family. Her condition, however, is not just that she can’t match the pitch she hears in a song. Studies show that Monica cannot discriminate between notes. She literally can’t tell one note from the other, can’t determine if one is “sour” compared to another, can’t detect melodic patterns of any kind. With respect to music, she is completely tone-deaf. Monica does not enjoy listening to music. It appears to be a source of stress, as perhaps her schoolmates could attest: Monica was in her church choir and school band as a little girl.
You would never know that Monica has pitch discrimination issues if you struck up a conversation with her, however. She speaks just like the rest of us. Her voice goes down when she finishes a declarative sentence (she’s no Valley Girl), and her voice goes up when she is finished with a question. Monica can detect these changes in pitch, in both her voice and the voice of anyone else.
In another case of amusia, a child attempted piano lessons. His instructor soon found he could not discriminate between two pitches (and also could not keep time). When it came to speech, though, it was a different story. He fluently spoke three languages besides his native tongue.
It seems odd that people can detect pitch changes when their brains decide they are listening to speech, but they become completely addled if their brains decide they are listening to music. When sound waves enter your ear, how does the brain determine whether you are listening to environmental noise, speech, or music? This question turns out to be important for a variety of reasons. As we shall see later, people who have lost speech abilities can often regain them through exposure to music. That doesn’t happen if all they hear is the spoken word. How does that work? What is the brain’s criteria for distinguishing music? Scientists don’t know. We just know that the brain at some point seems to separate music from speech.
However, it’s the purple section of our Venn diagram—the area where the neurological processing domains for speech and music overlap—that is most interesting to the question at hand. This overlap is the reason that music training affects aspects of speech: if you improve one, you can also improve the other.
Music lessons improve social skills
What else can music training do—besides, of course, make people better musicians? Watch the jazz band the Pat Metheny Group play “Have You Heard” live, and you may get an idea.
Pat Metheny is a bushy-haired American jazz guitarist and composer, winner of 19 Grammy Awards. He has been making records since the mid-1970s. I saw a video of him performing live in Japan in 1995, and the group’s improvisatory prowess was on full display. Besides the joyous virtuoso performance, the impression that strikes me most is the almost ridiculous cooperation of the band. There are five saxes, five trumpets, two vocalists, a string bass, keyboards, several rhythm sections, and probably a bunch of people I can’t see. There is plenty of room for error, yet that is exactly what you don’t hear. The musicians switch off performing solos throughout the song, tossing around melodies like Frisbees, and yet they play as one person. They don’t even have to look at each other—they can’t, in fact; the stage is mostly dark. The musicians signal to each other using the subtle nonverbal cues so legendary in jazz performance, creating musical dialogues only seasoned musicians can make intelligible. It is exhilarating, magical stuff.
How do they achieve such coordination? Is there something about performing in a musical group that trains people to look for subtle cues in others, in the service of coordinating a goal-oriented activity? Behavior done for the good of a group, or for the good of another individual, is termed “prosocial.” The action could be as exotic as allowing another musician solo space in a jazz concert so that he or she may shine, or it could be as mundane as making dinner when your spouse is sick. Prosocial skills, you can imagine, profoundly influence a person’s social abilities in all aspects of life.
Does music training confer social, not just cognitive, benefits? You don’t have to be good enough to play in Mr. Metheny’s band to know that is exactly what one finds. The research we’ll look at next spans the age spectrum from adults to infants.
Musicians are better at detecting emotion
If you’ve ever cried because you were yelled at, you know: words convey emotions. You can find out what somebody is feeling by detecting how they are saying something. We call such abilities “vocal affective discrimination skills.” Researchers asked: How good are trained musicians at these skills compared to nonmusicians?
In one study, English-speaking musicians and nonmusicians heard various emotions expressed in Tagalog, a Philippine language that was foreign to them. They were asked to identify any emotion they heard. How good were they at detecting the emotional information in what was being said, even though they could not understand the words? The results were dramatic. Trained musicians were champs, while nonmusicians were surprisingly bad at it. Musicians were especially good at discerning sadness and fear. They actually scored higher when listening to Tagalog than when listening to their native English! Studies like these laid the groundwork for demonstrating that music might improve social skills.
Another research effort involved college-age students who had received musical training for 10-plus years. The researchers eavesdropped on the students’ brain activity using noninvasive imaging technologies while playing various auditory cues. They were specifically interested in the students’ brain stems—the primal, most evolutionarily ancient parts of our brains. What exactly were their brains doing as they listened to the audio cues, compared to the brains of nonmusicians?
Consistent with previous findings, the researchers found that the musicians outpaced the nonmusicians in discriminating emotional information. These undergraduates were especially good at detecting subtle changes in the sound, timing, and pitch of a baby’s cry, for heaven’s sake. (Getting this right can be enormously difficult to do.) We call such talents fine-grained discrimination. Extending the previous findings, the researchers showed that musicians’ brain stems were more efficient at this neural-processing task. Specifically, their brains exhibited increased time-domain responses to complex emotional information. Their brains, not just their behaviors, were better.
Much research remains to be done, however. It’s unclear whether music training directly improves this ability, or whether people who are naturally better at fine-grained discrimination have a tendency to like music and stick with music lessons.
Music lessons make kids more empathetic
Researchers wanted to know whether music training could directly cause changes in social ability.
Fifty kids, ages 8 to 11, were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first group took group music classes for an entire academic year. The delightful curriculum consisted of rhythmic improvisation, musical games, melodic repetition, and shared musical experiences. The second group played games that also involved imitating and interactive experiences—but verbal mostly, no music. The third group simply attended the regular school year. The question was: How good were the children’s social abilities at the end of the school year? Before the experiments commenced, researchers established baseline measures by testing the children’s social skills, such as empathy, including Theory of Mind abilities.
The children in the music group had the most improved empathy scores. Like the adults, these kids had a stronger ability to decode the emotional information in their social surroundings, both verbally and nonverbally. They also were better at imitating facial expressions. The children who took the music class also had more empathetic responses to artificially posed situations, as measured by the Bryant’s Index of Empathy (an instrument used to measure pediatric empathy). The other two groups showed no such improvement.
Said lead researcher Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, “Overall, the capacity for empathy in children that participated in our musical group interaction program significantly increased.”
The experiment has since been replicated with 6-year-olds, by researchers in Canada.
Infants are more social, too
So far, we can detect the social benefits of music lessons in older adults, undergraduates, and elementary-school children. How far back can you push this? Can you detect social benefits if you give music lessons to infants? You can’t go much earlier than that. Amazingly, the researchers found similar findings.
Six-month-old babies took a parent-and-child music class for six months. The instruction was based roughly on Suzuki methodology, one that requires active group participation. Activities involved lots of singing, lots of banging on instruments, and learning songs in class, which parents were asked to repeat at home. Not surprisingly, this group was called the Active Group. A second group served as the control. These parents and tots instead listened to Baby Einstein music CDs while playing with toys together. Predictably, they were called the Passive Group.
You can actually measure social competence in babies using a complex instrument called the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ), which assesses infants on 14 aspects of temperament. Researchers measured both groups to get a baseline. Then the experiment commenced. How did the babies do? If you are a music advocate, get ready for some spine-tingling data.
The Active Group outpaced the Passive Group socially in virtually every way you can measure it. They smiled more. They laughed more. They were much easier to calm down when they were stressed. In limitation assessments (a measure of how well you react to unexpected stimuli), they exhibited much less stress than their Passive counterparts. The infants’ gestures—such as waving goodbye and pointing—were improved, a companion paper showed. That may be important. Such prelinguistic communication leads to more positive social interactions between parent and child. And that improves infant cognition in virtually every way you can measure it.
What’s going on here? We don’t know for sure. The Passive Group was exposed to the same amount of music as the Active Group, as well as the same amount of social interaction. Making music may simply provide an environment where one gets to exercise greater social cooperation and generally prosocial behaviors than when playing with toys. In this view, the secret sauce lies not with the music, but with the interaction. Or it could be the music itself, for both groups of children experienced sustained interaction with their parents. Either way, a method involving music has been found to make kids more empathetic, more relational.
Which is the point.
Though these and several other experiments are interventions, showing whether music training directly caused the effects, the vast majority of studies are associative in nature. Still, taken together, these studies suggest—sometimes strongly—that music training boosts foundational speech-processing tasks, spatial skills, the detection of emotional cues, empathy, and baby-size social skills. Next, let’s look at the effects of simply listening to music.
Music changes your mood
“The word is breast!” my mother yelled from the kitchen. This brought my 13-year-old mind very quickly to attention. She clarified: “Music soothes the savage breast! I believe it was from some old play …” her voice trailed off.
I was in the TV room, watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon called Hurdy-Gurdy Hare, and my mother had overheard a line. The plot was standard Looney Tunes fare, with dollops of humor for both adults and children, involving an escaped gorilla now after Bugs. After a lot of antics, the gorilla traps Bugs Bunny in the back room of an apartment. Conveniently, and in the nick of time, Bugs finds a violin and begins playing. Immediately the gorilla calms down, then begins moving to the music. Bugs says snarkily says to the camera, “They say music calms the savage beast.” I did not see what happened next because of my mom’s comment. She was right, of course. According to scholars, the line is from the pen of 17th-century playwright William Congreve, and properly reads “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.”
Either way, music’s ability to affect one’s mood and subsequent behavior is a common theme in literature. Researchers will tell you the reason is biochemical. It is a surprisingly well-established fact that music can induce hormonal changes. These changes result in alterations of mood. Well duh, say music fans around the world. Anybody who has ever listened to their favorite song could testify to that. It is not earth-shattering to find that music can induce pleasure. “Enjoyment arousal,” as it’s called, is sometimes accompanied by a temporary boost in certain skills. For that, we can thank three hormones: dopamine, cortisol, and oxytocin.
Dopamine
Noted Canadian researcher Robert Zatorre has studied people’s emotional reactions to music for a long time. He and his colleagues have found that when people hear their very favorite music (I mean spine-tingling, awe-inspiring, fly-me-to-the-moon music), their bodies dump dopamine into a specific part of their brain.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, involved in mediating processes from feeling pleasure to memory formation. It floods the striatal system, a curved structure in the middle of the brain that’s involved in many functions, including evaluating the significance you assign to a given stimulus. Zatorre found that when you hear music that gives you goose bumps (called “musical frisson”), the striatal system is activated via dopamine release. Music may soothe the savage human by exploiting this mechanism.
Surgery is not a pleasurable experience for most people. Some patients are genuinely freaked out, however, to the point of requiring medical intervention. Researchers asked, “Could music reduce the stress of people about to undergo surgery?” To answer the question, they divided 372 patients into two groups. The first group would listen to music before going under the knife. The second group would take an antistress pill (midazolam) prior to surgery.
Who experienced the least amount of stress, as measured by respiration and heart rate, among other assays? The music group. They felt 13 percent less anxious than the stress-pill group before their surgeries. Listening to classical or meditation music had the greatest effect.
Oxytocin
Oxytocin plays a huge role in social bonding. This talented molecule stimulates temporary feelings of trust, orgasms, lactation, and even birth (pitocin, a drug that induces contractions, is a synthetic form of oxytocin). It even gets some mammals, like the prairie vole, to mate for life. Given this social track record, it is a big deal when the brain increases its production of oxytocin as a response to some external cue.
Researchers have discovered that when people sing as a group, as they would in a choir, oxytocin courses through their brains. An uptick in the hormone is a fairly reliable indicator of feelings of trust, love, and acceptance. This may explain why people in a choir often report feeling so close to each other.
University of Montreal researcher Dan Levitin, in an interview with NPR, said the same of playing music together: “We now know that when people play music together, oxytocin is released. … This is the bonding hormone that’s released when people have an orgasm together. And so you have to ask yourself, that can’t be a coincidence; there had to be some evolutionary pressure there. Language doesn’t produce it, music does. …” This flies in the face of Pinker’s auditory cheesecake, as you may have noted.
These data suggest a mechanism whereby music makes people happy, calms them down, maybe even makes them feel close to each other. I can personally attest to these feelings.
My wife is a classically trained pianist and a composer (she scores documentaries). In the past few years, she has really gotten into Irish, Scottish, and Celtic music. One gorgeous Gaelic song she regularly listens to speaks to me also. I’m hydrated with this glorious cocktail of haunting, calming, restful feelings, right from its opening bars. That turned out to be important on a day we had driven from Seattle to Vancouver, British Columbia. We were on vacation, and I was not having a restful time at all. It was downtown at rush hour—Vancouver at its worst—and I was in a slow burn trying to find our hotel, my tension increasing with every missed intersection. Stress hormones were boiling my blood, something my wife is good at detecting. She found the CD with that Gaelic song, slipped it into the car stereo, and played it full volume. From a distance I detected the calming feelings. I attempted to give in to them and immediately felt peace wash over me. We quickly found our lodgings. As I can attest, the calming ability of music can be very pleasurable … especially for the other people in the car.
But more importantly, these hormones represent a powerful effort from researchers to transform anecdotal, ephemeral impressions about the power of music into the exacting physical world of cells and molecules. The findings may have medical implications.
The promise of music therapy
Using music as medicine for sick patients has a long history. The Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed it for mentally ill patients. During World War I, hospitals in the UK employed musicians to play for wounded soldiers in convalescence. It seemed not only to calm them down but also to reduce their pain. None of this was measured in any formal way at the time, but the observation was so persistent that the practice continued into World War II. Observations like these eventually led to the establishment of formal music-therapy associations.
Slowly but surely, these anecdotal observations attracted the notice of the research community, and clear findings have emerged. Music has been shown to aid speech recovery in head-trauma patients, for example. Gabrielle Giffords (the US representative who survived a gunshot to the head) regained regular speech in part by singing. Researchers think it works by forcing the brain to sign up unused regions of the brain for speech duty. Nobody knows why music does this. Dr. Oliver Sacks, interviewed about Giffords’s recovery in a documentary, said: “Nothing activates the brain so extensively as music. It has been possible to create a new language area in the right hemisphere. And that blew my mind.”
Music improves the recovery rates of specific cognitive abilities in stroke patients. In one study, patients who underwent six months of music therapy were compared to patients who got “talk therapy.” The results were extraordinary. In measurements of verbal memory, the talk therapy patients achieved a score of 7 (that’s not so good). The music group achieved a score of 23 (that’s really good). Measurements of focused attention showed a similar disparity: the talk-therapy group scored a 1, while the music-therapy group scored an 11. In overall language skills at the end of six months, the talk-therapy group scored a 5. The music-therapy group scored a 21.
Among stroke patients with motor difficulties, including those with Parkinson’s and cerebral palsy, researchers find similar positive results. Music-therapy patients routinely outscore patients exposed to more traditional therapies in measurements of arm movements and of gait as they walk. Music seems to serve as a predictable metronome that helps people coordinate their movements.
Most of these studies have been done on adults, often our oldest citizens. What about some of our youngest?
Prematurely born infants, living in a hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), gained weight more rapidly when music was played. Music helped them learn how to suck at their mothers’ breasts more readily. It also reduced their overall stress levels, which may explain the other findings. One study found that female (though not male) infants’ stay in the unit would be decreased by 11 days if music were played, compared to no music. It is now standard for hospitals across the country to pipe calm, peaceful music into their NICUs.
Why does music have these effects? Again, we don’t know for sure. One idea, the “arousal and mood hypothesis,” was published in 2001. It proposed that the three hormones explain why music speeds recovery. It’s still just a hypothesis, but it’s paving the way for some serious neuroscience. Stay tuned.
More ideas
Too many of these intriguing studies don’t prove cause, and they’re all done in a lab setting. I’d like to see a school district take up research on music programs and help determine the effects of music training in a real-world setting. As soon as kids enter first grade, schools would randomly assign a large number of them to one of two groups. The first group would take lessons on a musical instrument, with formal instruction and ensemble training. Lessons would be daily, consistent, and as mandatory as math class. The program would last at least 10 years, ending when the students are juniors in high school. The second group would receive no music training.
With this kind of large-scale, long-term research program, we could see whether students who get music training perform better on tests involving speech proficiency at the end of the 10-year period than those without the training. And language arts. And second languages. Since emotional regulation has such a powerful effect on academic performance (see the Stress chapter), additional questions are relevant as well. We could see if the kids with music training have better emotional regulation. If they get better grades. If they’re more cooperative in group settings not related to music. If music training reduces antisocial behavior, such as bullying, at school. Music training almost certainly teaches discipline, a form of impulse control (you continue practicing for 10 years, even if you’d rather not).
If the answer was affirmative to even one of these questions, we would end up with a truly interesting principle: One way to create a higher-functioning student is to hire back band teacher Ray Vizcarra. And if it comes time to cut the school budget, the last activity to go would be formal musical training.
Brain Rule #10
Study or listen to boost cognition.
• Formal musical training improves intellectual skills in several cognitive domains. Music boosts spatiotemporal skills, vocabulary, picking out sounds in a noisy environment, working memory, and sensory-motor skills.
• Formal music training also aids social cognition. People with music training are better able to detect the emotional information in speech. Empathy skills and other prosocial behaviors improve.
• Variations on these effects have been shown in adults, college students, schoolchildren, even infants.
