Your Brain on Music

This is Your Brain on Music?

By Dylan Roche

Turning on some tunes might be your go-to way to relax or unwind, but science says there’s much more to the way your brain processes music than most of us realize—it provides mental stimulation and can, actually, keep your mind sharp and healthy throughout your life.

Health experts (and educators) have been fixed on the relationships between music and brain activity for decades. Much of the mainstream focus started in the early ’90s after a study found classical music, specifically Mozart, could boost brain power, even helping people achieve higher IQ scores. That study has since been debunked, but not before creating a widespread cultural interest in how listening to music affects mental activity. And subsequent studies have shown that, yes, listening to music is good for your noggin.

As Johns Hopkins Medicine puts it, music is like exercise for your brain. This doesn’t just apply to classical music either. Any kind of music is good for you! Whether you prefer jazz, rock, pop, R&B, heavy metal, or hip-hop, listening to music will activate a broad range of networks in your brain.

It starts when the vibrations enter your ear canal and hit your ear drum. From there, signals go through your auditory nerves to your brain. Your brain then starts doing a kind of computation as it tries to understand the relationships between the different musical notes. Even if you don’t realize it, this is a challenge for your brain—and it makes your brain stronger.

If you listen to music, you probably already know that you have all kinds of reactions to it. It makes you emotional. It stimulates memories from association with music you’ve heard in the past. You might even feel your motor system impulsively moving along to the beat. Harvard Medical School explains that all these reactions are thanks to the way music activates a broad network in your brain.

Maybe you’ve heard a song before that you didn’t like at first, but it started to grow on you. That’s because the first time you hear it, your brain might be struggling to understand it. As you listen to it over and over again, you have an easier time processing it mentally. It’s now a pleasant experience to hear it.

Surveys show that people who frequently listen to music throughout their life report greater confidence in learning and retaining information, as well as elevated mood and sense of confidence. Starting young gives your mind a head start (all the more reason to make music available to children from infancy), but even adults who weren’t exposed to music when they were little but became frequent listeners later in life tend to have better cognitive function than those who don’t listen to music at all.