“Life without music would be no life at all”
We are surrounded by music in our lives. Not just the music we listen to the radio or from a television commercial, but the music of a car engine, or a bird chirping in a tree. Although our visual system is one of the highest developed in humans, the auditory system plays a very important role as well. Many areas of our brains are devoted to language and music.
Imagine yourself at a performance. Your visual cortex is watching dancers perform and move their bodies to the beat of the music. You are listening to the music they are dancing by means of the auditory cortex. At the climax of the show your prefrontal cortex prepares for what’s about to happen. As the play goes on, your motor cortex and cerebellum make you tap your feet to the music and finally the emotional feeling of happiness, sadness, or fear from the play is then processed by the amygdala and nucleus accumbens. This play in the end left you with an unforgettable feeling that will be stored in your memory by the hippocampus and will be recorded as an unforgettable experience. As you can see, our brain integrates many systems to process sounds.
Music is the process of combining a milieu of sounds into a meaningful harmonious pattern. I believe that music is “on the ears of the beholder”. What may sound harmonious and beautiful to me, might be nothing more than a group of sounds to the next person.
The benefits of a
musical brain
No matter what you do, our brains change and adapt based on our skills (brain plasticity). The brain structures of musicians are quite different; including the volume of gray matter in the motor, auditory and visual-spatial brain regions. Professional piano players for example, require less amounts of neurons to be activated to perform the motor task of playing piano than non-musicians do. Even when you compare the dexterity of their finger movements doing unrelated piano movements, they still show less activation. This indicates that less neurons need to be activated on highly trained brains which in turn conserves more energy.
You really do not need to be a full time musician to take advantage of the benefits of being musical. Music has clearly been shown to be beneficial in many areas of our lives. In a recent study at Northwestern University, Dr. Kraus showed that children that can tap to a beat and follow it, are more speech consistent than children that can’t tap a beat in time.
This suggests that playing music early in childhood can enhance children's ability to improve reading skills. Our brains exposed to music learn how to focus on specific sounds which can be very useful when assimilating speech.
by Dr. German Garcia-Fresco
Neuroscientist
Perreault Magazine - 32 -
THE POWER OF MUSIC