How Does Music Affect Your Brain? | Tech Effects | WIRED

♪ (music) ♪

These days, you hear music all the time.

It wakes us up, motivates our workouts,

keeps us company on our commutes.

It doesné matter what kind of music it is,

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

in all sorts of ways.

We nod our heads, we sway, dance.

Music can give us chills,

even make us cry.

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

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

that music doesn't touch in some way.

But what's behind all that?

What exactly does music do to us?

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

designed to measure my responses to musiC.

I met some kids whose brains may actually be changing,

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

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

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

all to find out how music affects us.

♪ (music) ♪

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

We visited the USC Brain and Creativity Institute,

where I had my head examined, literally,

to try to figure it out.

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

a tiny tube will surround me.

We'll get a baseline reading of my brain,

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

We're going to see how my brain responds.

Just close your eyes, relax,

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

♪ (music) ♪

And here's what we saw.

These are scans of my brain.

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

in blue, below average.

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

not just in one specific area.

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

and music is in the right side of the brain.

But now that we've got better quality tools,

higher resolution imaging and better experimental methods,

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

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

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

and it stops at specialized processing units in auditory cortex,

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

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

or watching music

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

and cerebellum which mediates the emotional responses;

the memory and the hippocampus,

hearing a familiar passage,

finding it somewhere in your memory banks