All quotes from This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Dopamine. Gotta love that happy little chemical.
Dopamine is released by the nucleus accumbens and is involved in mood regulation and the coordination of movement. It is most famous for being part of the brain’s pleasure and reward system. When drug addicts get their drug of choice, or when compulsive gamblers win a bet – even when chocoholics get cocoa – this is the neurotransmitter is released.
Are you ADD? Do you struggle with depression? Chances are, you have squirrelly dopamine levels. Stay tuned to this post!
So what does this have to do with music?
Well, let’s get scientifically jiggy with it and find out.
…Listening to music caused a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: first, auditory cortex for initial processing of the components of the sound. Then the frontal regions…that we previously identified as being involved in processing musical structure and expectations. Finally, a network of regions – the mesolimbic system – involved in arousal, pleasure, and the transmission of opiods and the production of dopamine, culminating in activation in the nucleus accumbens. And the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout, presumably supporting the processing of rhythm and meter. The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum’s contribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one of the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people’s moods. Now we think we know why.
Boiling that down, music makes your brain get its groove on! All sorts of fun neurological things start happening, and the end result is “increased positive mood and affect”! But what kind of music makes this mood magic happen?
The short answer is: The RIGHT music for you. What makes the right music for you is based on several factors:
The balance between simplicity and complexity in music also informs our preferences. Scientific studies of like and dislike across a variety of aesthetic domains – painting, poetry, dance, and music – have shown that an orderly relationship exists between the complexity of an artistic work and how much we like it. Of course, complexity is an entirely subjective concept. In order for the notion to make any sense, we have to allow for the idea that what seems impenetrably complex to Stanley might fall right in the “sweet spot” for Oliver. Similarly, what one person finds insipid and hideously simple, another person might find difficult to understand, based on differences in background, experience, understanding, and cognitive schemas.
It was funny, the boys’ drum teacher called to check on me (I had surgery recently) a few days ago. In the course of the conversation he told me about an upcoming concert he was producing at the studio. He invited me to come and encouraged me to “bring your parents! She (the artist) will be doing lots of jazz standards…” I started laughing. Now see, I love jazz. But my parents hate it. When I start listening to jazz, they start saying I’m adopted. You see, my brain likes a different level of musical complexity than theirs. And it’s not that they don’t like good music or have good taste. They both do. But we’re all wired differently – so where my mom loves Selah, I love Rockapella. My Dad enjoys Puccini, I swing with Gershwin. Some of our tastes overlap…but in some areas we are widely different. Environment and age have something to do with that, of course, but some of the reasons for variances of taste are apparently part of our neurological coding.
All that psychobabble to state the obvious – What works for me musically might not work for you! But I think it’s an important point to make. All that hoopla about Mozart potentially making babies smarter (which wasn’t really the case, by the way)… What if the real melodic mojo is not about listening to any one particular composer or genre – but more about finding the musical key (pun intended) for your own, or your child’s, mental lock?
The way to go about doing that, of course, is trial and error. Play lots of different music for your family. See what you respond to! You did this automatically when you were younger - and by now I’m sure you have defined musical tastes. But there may be whole undiscovered countries of musical joy awaiting you if you give new-to-you music a chance. I’ve only recently discovered that I love Tchaikovsky. Ohhh - that music does all sorts of happy things to me! Here’s an important tip though - don’t just play something one time. When I was a teen and finally in charge of my own music purchases, I realized early on that it took several plays of a new album before I could figure out if I liked it. I said I had to “train my brain” to listen to something. This was true even if it was an artist that I loved. Sting, for example. I started out listening to The Police as a small child, then began buying every solo album of Sting’s as soon as it hit the stores. (and I’ve seen him in concert three times!) But even with Sting, I always had to listen to the new album four or five times before I was ready to say I liked it. I was more right than I knew that what was needed was “brain training”.
When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable – we don’t perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form for that matter, has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity in order for us to like it. Simplicity and complexity relate to familiarity, and familiarity is just another word for a schema.
A schema is a framework for understanding. If you’re going to enjoy a piece of music, you need a neurological basis for understanding it.
Trying to appreciate new music can be like contemplating a new friendship in that it takes time, and sometimes there is nothing you can do to speed it up. At a neural level, we need to be albe to find a few landmarks in order to invoke a cognitive schema. If we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks.
This doesn’t mean that you will start liking everything after playing it enough times. But it does mean that you need to try a genre or composer more than once before you can decide if it floats your boat or your kids’.
I’ve seen this with my own children with concert videos. When we first purchased the DVD Blast!, not one of them would sit through it. But I played it several times (hey – I liked it!) and after about five, they were enthralled. I trained their brains to appreciate it! Kiddie movies work faster because of their simplicity. Kids are hooked immediately and you get that wonderful electronic babysitter effect. But with a little patience, you can influence their tastes to more complex matter that is better for them – and more enjoyable for you!
Okay. So. The “right” music can up your dopamine production – which is a good thing. And the “right” music for any individual is based in part on each person’s own mental wiring. However, the wiring can be influenced by exposure to new music. All of this to explain why it’s a good and proper thing to give lots of different music a chance in your home.
So what are you listening to? What do you know you DON’T like? (and I’m not talking about lyrics here) What music do you think really gets your dopamine flowing? How about your children?