Question

What is it that draws us as humans to music? How can listening to music impact our emotions, thoughts, or behaviors? What examples do you have from your own life of music impacting you in some way? What explanation can there be for how different music, which has different sounds, has different effects on us?

Answer 1

• Perhaps what we hear resonates deeply within our nervous system. In fact, while we listen to music, so much of the brain is activated – not only the temporal lobe, known for its role in sound recognition and processing, but other cortical areas involved in planning and executing movements of our body, areas involved in empathy and emotion, and curiously, areas involved in the production of language.
• It could be said that the more music resonates with deeper levels of thought and emotion, the more we are moved by and attracted to it.
• Research indicates that music stimulates emotions through specific brain circuits. We can easily see how music and the brain engage mood and emotion when a child smiles and begins to dance to a rhythm. He is experiencing an uplifted mood of joy from the music.
• Outside of music affecting the brain as an emotional experience, it is also a physical experience. One reason for this is a hormone related to bonding called oxytocin. The “cuddle hormone,” as it’s sometimes called, can be released by singing.
• Listening to music can create peak emotions, which increase the amount of dopamine, a specific neurotransmitter that is produced in the brain and helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers.
• Music evokes and engages our emotions in many stages of our lives both individually and in groups. Music can evoke the deepest emotions in people and help us process fear, grief, sadness, and resentment, even if these emotions are held on a subconscious level.
• There is a part of the brain that associates music and memories when we experience emotionally salient episodic memories that are triggered by familiar songs from our personal past. In other words, our own familiar music can reconnect people with deep, meaningful memories from their past.
• Sometimes when we listen to some song,it connects with us,and we start remembering our experiences in the past and connect them with the song.Lyrics of the song sometimes act as a trigger to bring our memories back whether good or bad.
• Music has definitely impacted me in a major way since I love it and when I feel like disconnecting with the world I listen to music and its a mixed bag.Some songs are random and some hold a meaning in life.Music has also helped me focus my attention while doing work,so now without it I cannot work,but it is obviously restricted to only my house.Listening old classical music also maybe instilled some patience and calm in me.
• There is difference between music and just plain noise.Some of the music doesnt make any sense at all and uses abusive language,which can definitely make the person develop a negative and cynical approach towards life.Music is something which has meaning and which touches your heart and you are able to develop a connection with it and maybe learn something from it.
• People who are singers or musicians have a different way of listening to songs than normal people like us.They go into deeper analysis of the pitch,tone etc. but we either like it or not.
• Music genres like metal,hard rock etc. are darker forms of music which I feel comes from a place of insecurity and lack of meaning in life and that is why I feel followers of such music succumb to more negative lifestyle.