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♪ (music) ♪

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These days, you hear music all the time.

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It wakes us up, motivates our workouts,

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keeps us company on our commutes.

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It doesné matter what kind of music it is,

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music itself has the ability to affect our moods and our bodies

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in all sorts of ways.

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We nod our heads, we sway, dance.

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Music can give us chills,

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even make us cry.

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Music activates every area of the brain we have so far mapped.

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In fact, there's no area of the brain we know about

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that music doesn't touch in some way.

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But what's behind all that?

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What exactly does music do to us?

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To find out, I went to a whole series of tests

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designed to measure my responses to musiC.

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I met some kids whose brains may actually be changing,

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thanks to those hours of learning, practice, and performing.

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I spoke with a therapist who used music to help former congressman [ ] learn to speak again,

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and got a glimpse inside the brain of a two-time winning artist while he played,

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all to find out how music affects us.

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♪ (music) ♪

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So what's going on when we listen to music?

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We visited the USC Brain and Creativity Institute,

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where I had my head examined, literally,

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to try to figure it out.

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I'm going to go into this [FMRI] machine,

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a tiny tube will surround me.

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We'll get a baseline reading of my brain,

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and then I'm going to listen to some music.

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We're going to see how my brain responds.

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Just close your eyes, relax,

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and tey and get into the music as best you can, okay?

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♪ (music) ♪

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And here's what we saw.

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These are scans of my brain.

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The areas in red are where my activity is above average;

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in blue, below average.

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As you can see, there is red activity all over my brain,

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not just in one specific area.

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Twenty-five years ago, the idea was that language is on the left side of the brain

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and music is in the right side of the brain.

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But now that we've got better quality tools,

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higher resolution imaging and better experimental methods,

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we've discovered that's not at all right.

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How does that play out in different regions of the brain?

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When music enters and then gets shuttled off to different parts of the brain

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and it stops at specialized processing units in auditory cortex,

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they track loudness and pitch and rhythm and [tambour] and things like that,

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there's visual cortex activation when you're reading music as a musician

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or watching music

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motor cortex when you're tapping your feet, snapping your fingers, clapping you hands;

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and cerebellum which mediates the emotional responses;

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the memory and the hippocampus,

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hearing a familiar passage,

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finding it somewhere in your memory banks