Who doesn’t love listening to songs! Nowadays we do many of our work listening to songs from workout to personal stuff. Frankly speaking this article has been penned by me listening to Clean Bandit’s Rockabye! Music has been an integral part of our lives from centuries. Right from DJ during parties to therapies to kill stress, music has been influencing our lives in every facet. It directly affects our mood or our mood attracts the genre of music we want to play. Its vice-versa too! Let’s see why and how music has this much control over our brain.

Music: influencing our mood

Have you come across moments when you have got goosebumps listening to any song or a chill down your spine? All this is due to Dopamine, a chemical released by the brain. This chemical is directly involved in motivation. These studies justify why music always has been such a huge part of emotional events around the world since ages. Also the favorite songs in your playlist hugely talks about you. Observations say that though the favorite songs keep on changing with new releases, the long lasting ones have a memory of yours or emotional connect to it. Context influences our choices.

Music: occupying significant part of brain and influencing brain structure

On basis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI), a research team observed people listening to music continuously over a period of time. They found that listening to music recruits the auditory areas employing large-scale neural networks in the brain. Music can activate emotionaland creative areas of the brain. Also, brain structure is easily influenced by music. Brain is like plastic that enables it to change itself throughout the lifetime of a human. Changes related to learn­ing occurs mostly at the connec­tions between neu­rons. When carrying out the research on brains of musicians, they found that the cor­tex vol­ume was high­est in pro­fes­sional musi­cians, inter­me­di­ate in ama­teur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians.

Music: as a daily activity brain responds to

Dopamine is a chemical released by the brain as we saw above. This chemical is connected with the feeling of euphoria which is associated with addiction, anticipations and even eating food. Dopamine is what enables a person to feel the pleasures of such things. Study says that people react in same way to music as they react to taste of food.

Music: our workout-buddy

Dissociation is a technique which lowers the perceptions of effort. This technique can divert the mind from feelings of fatigue, scale up positive mood states and makes you feel fresh and active. Thus while working out, people usually listen to songs to make the work more pleasurable than tiring. We can listen songs while carrying out exercises from low to moderate intensities.

Music: chanting “Om”

People often chant “Om” while meditating. “Om” is considered to contain the sounds of entire universe. Chanting is a form of music that develops a spiritual connection between brain and mood. As we chant “Om”, our mental chatters are released and our mind shifts to solace and spiritual connections.