5/5/24, 10:57 PM How does music affect your brain?

| Live Science

How does music affect your brain?

References By Becks Shepherd published December 15, 2022

Music can have wide-ranging effects on the brain, impacting everything from cognitive
performance to stress levels.

Jump to:

Cognitive
performance

Anxiety and
depression

Stress

Dopamine production

The negative effects

of music

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Many people listen to music while working, exercising at the gym, or simply relaxing. But
how does music affect your brain?

Along with triggering a release of the feel-good hormone dopamine, science has shown that
listening to music may boost our cognitive function, potentially relieve symptoms of anxiety
and stress, and help us to stay focused. It's no wonder that many of us choose to listen to
music before, during and after workouts. To get the most out of that listening experience,
check out our list of the best running headphones.

"When you hear a song, your auditory cortex — the part of your brain responsible for
processing sound — is activated," Desiree Silverstone, a psychotherapist based in London,
England, told Live Science. "This activates other areas of your brain, including the limbic
system — responsible for emotion — and the motor cortex, which controls movement."

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5/5/24, 10:57 PM How does music affect your brain? | Live Science

Silverstone added that as more areas of the brain are activated, we may start to feel the effects
of the music. If you're listening to fast-paced music, for example, you may start to feel more
alert
Jump and
to: energetic. If you're listening to relaxing music, you may start to feel calmer and

more relaxed.
Cognitive
performance

Anxiety and COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE

depression

How
Stress many times have you remembered the lyrics to a song, but couldn't recall what you did

over the production

Dopamine weekend? Music goes a lot further than just filling a void. In a 2008 study, published
in
Thethe journal
negative Perception and Motor Skills, researchers discovered that rhythm with or
effects
of music musical accompaniment may be able to "facilitate recall of text", meaning listening
without
to music could help us to remember pieces of information.

In addition, a 2010 study in Perceptual and Motor Skills found that music may be able to
improve our cognitive function outside the context of memory tasks. The experiment, which
tasked 56 male and female university students with completing a linguistic and spatial
processing task while listening to 10 excerpts of Mozart symphonies, found that background
music was linked to an increase in the speed of spatial processing (how fast we recognize the
shapes, patterns and positions of objects) and the accuracy of linguistic processing (our
ability to process words).

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