Listening Practice - How Music Affect Your Brain

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Audio

Quiz

1. What happens in the brain when musicians play instruments?

They feel sleepy
Only one part of the brain lights up
Multiple areas of the brain light up
They forget how to play

2. What tools help neuroscientists observe brain activity?

X-rays
fMRI and PET scanners
Microscopes
Thermometers

3. What is playing music compared to in the brain?

A good nap
A movie night
A full-body workout
Meditation

4. What parts of the brain are especially active when playing music?

Only the visual cortex
Visual, auditory, and motor cortices
Just the motor cortex
None of them

5. What happens when we just *listen* to music?

We become sleepy
Only one brain part is used
Multiple brain areas are activated
Our feet always tap

Transcript

Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain?

On the outside, they may look calm and focused, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required.

But inside their brains, there's a party going on.

How do we know this? Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time with instruments like fMRI and PET scanners.

When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks such as reading or doing math problems each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks.

Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once, as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into a unified musical experience.

And our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along.

But when scientists turned from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee.

It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout.

The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly fast sequences.

Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices.

Glossary

• fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging): A technique that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.
• PET Scanner (Positron Emission Tomography): An imaging test that helps reveal how tissues and organs are functioning.
• Auditory Cortex: The part of the brain that processes sound.
• Motor Cortex: The area of the brain involved in planning and executing movement.
• Visual Cortex: The part of the brain that processes visual information.