Your Mind Loves Music

That music affects our brains, mood, and emotions in often inexplicable ways is something we have known instinctively since the dawn of consciousness. But over the last few decades, advances in neuroscience, psychology, and brain science have been spurring symphonies of research and findings to help us understand the how and the why of it all.

Here are just a few ways that studies have shown how musical training may physically mold our brains:

• string players develop larger cortical representations of the fingers of their left hand;
• musicians who begin training before the age of seven have thicker nerve tissue connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain;
• a part of the brain that processes sound signals, the planum temporale, is larger in the left hemisphere and smaller in the right of musicians than of non-musicians;

And then there are a multitude of ways that music can affect mood and brain functioning:

• a meta-study of hundreds of scientific studies concluded that music has been shown to have positive effects on pain, sleep disorders, learning, memory, IQ, depression, anxiety and special diseases such as schizophrenia and autism;
• attention-based activities are enhanced while listening to jazz and Indian classical music while doing mental tasks;
• children who were given keyboard lessons for six months showed 30 percent higher scores on a spatial-temporal reasoning task compared to children who were given computer lessons or no training;
• in a study of recovery of cognitive function and mood in stroke patients, those who listened to their favorite music daily had significant improvement in higher cortical function, as compared to those who listened to audio books or nothing at all;
• after listening to Mozart’s double piano sonata K448, a highly-structured and ambitious composition, healthy subjects showed enhanced brain synchrony for a mean of 12 minutes in healthy subjects; further subjects with severe epileptic conditions showed signficant reductions in bilateral spike and wave.

Interestingly, for nearly a decade, Renée Fleming, one of the world’s most feted and beloved musicians, has been at the nexus of research and discussion about music and the mind.

It began about eight years ago, when she was invited to a dinner party that included three Supreme Court justices (Kennedy, Scalia, and Ginsburg), as well as National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Fleming’s acquaintance with Collins at that dinner set her on a path to begin investigating the interplay of mind and music.

She instigated the Sound Health initiative to explore and bring attention to research and practice at the intersection of music, health, and neuroscience. This led to workshops at the NIH, and events and performances at the Kennedy Center. It also led the NIH to award $20 million dollars in funding for music and neuroscience research over five years. And the Renée Fleming Foundation is also partnering with the Foundation for the NIH to develop a toolkit for standardizing music & health clinical research for brain disorders of aging.

And now, this coming April, Fleming will release a new book, Music and Mind, in which she curates a collection of essays from leading scientists, artists, creative arts therapists, educators, and healthcare providers about the powerful impacts of music and the arts on health and the human experience. In addition to describing music’s therapeutic benefits, the book explores evolution, brain function, childhood development, and technology as applied to arts and health.

Fleming has presented talks on this material in over 50 cities around the world, alongside leading researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. She will be bringing her talk to Festival of the Arts Boca on March 4, one day after returning for her recital performance on the same stage.

Your brain would like it if you don’t miss either of these seminal events.