If you doubt that music makes you smarter and enriches your life, then you may want to enroll at the University of Central Florida.
Professors and spouses Kiminobu Sugaya and Ayako Yonetani use their class, the most popular one on campus, to highlight how much your brain benefits from music. The neurochemist and concert violinist have teamed up since 2006 to share their insights via “Music and the Brain.”
They reinforce how tunes:
- Tap into your fears and memories
- Make time fly by
- Lower your pain and stress
- Ease your depression
- Make you more resilient and coordinated
- Repair brain damage
- Raise your IQ
- Slows down seizures
- Enhances how you communicate
- Parks your Parkinson’s Disease and abates Alzheimer’s Disease
The couple instructs students on how different parts of the brain light up during an MRI when music is played. In fact, melodies play off each of the 12 parts of the brain in unique ways.
- The frontal lobe works better at its job of planning, thinking, and making decisions.
- The temporal lobe handles the sounds in the right half of your brain and any lyrics in the left side, encouraging them to communicate.
- The amygdala processes your emotions and triggers new ones, whether a song makes you happy, sad, scared, or thrilled.
- Broca’s area helps you to speak and express music, so playing any instrument can make you communicate better.
- The cerebellum stores muscle memories and coordinates how you move. Therefore, people with Alzheimer’s Disease can still remember dance moves or how to play an instrument, even as their other memories fade.
- Like the temporal lobe, the corpus callosum gets the right and left hemispheres of your brain talking to each other as they process complex thoughts based on intuition and logic, respectively. It also helps your fingers play an instrument as you read the score on a page.
- When fogged in by Alzheimer’s Disease, the hippocampus loses its ability to create and retrieve memories, find our way around, and modulate our emotions. Music fires up its cells and helps repair them to slow the spread of the disease.
- The hypothalamus takes care of vital functions, such as reading and responding to signs that your body is thirsty, hungry, horny, sleepy, moody, or stressed. Listening to different types and paces of music can affect how it responds.
- The nucleus accumbens releases delicious dopamine, a hormone that makes you feel good. Therefore, treating yourself to a good song works like taking a drug.
- The occipital lobe processes what you see, which seems out of place for this list. However, musicians envision music as they play, while most of us just hear it.
- The putamen takes the dopamine produced by music and gets your toes tapping to the rhythm. This helps people with Parkinson’s Disease as this part of the brain overrides their inability to coordinate their movements, but only when music is playing.
- Wernicke’s area interprets written and oral language, which helps listeners enjoy music as they analyze it.
Music Trivia
Not only is music good for your brain, but so is learning new information. With that in mind, here is some additional information to consider:
- We are born with an abundance of neurons and lose those not being used around age eight. Therefore, we give up some of our ability to learn new things. If you start studying music as a young child, your brain becomes trained to appreciate it and retain that skill.
- Any type of music fires up your brain cells, although yours prefers the tunes from your youth. This reinforces the link between music and emotional memories, which you retain for life.
Reference
https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music/
