‘Music soothes the savage beast’ as the old saying goes. Music is an intrinsic part of our lives from the song playing when you had your first kiss, to music you revv yourself up with (or calm yourself down with) before you have a stressful meeting. As many of you are packing up to go on holiday this month (the schools have just broken up for the summer in the Amsterdam area), I thought I’d bring you some interesting new research about the effect music can have. But first a quickie lesson in the brain areas involved in music….

 

Music and Language, Intertwined

The brain activity for music and language is enormously complicated, and researchers are still trying to determine how the brain handles each process. Below is a sampling of what we do know: Areas in the frontal lobe (orange) help us learn the rules that govern language and music, such as those for syntax and harmony. Regions in the temporal lobe (green) help us perceive and understand sounds, such as the meaning of words and melodies.

The auditory cortex (blue) appears to have distinct music and language roles: the left auditory cortex is important for decoding and discriminating different aspects of speech, whereas the right auditory cortex is more involved in perceiving the pitch and frequency of sound. The insula (red) processes rhythm, perhaps in subtly different ways, for both music and speech. And the corpus callosum (grey) is larger in the brains of musicians, suggesting that musicians require greater communication between the two hemispheres.

 

Singing Your Way to Fitness

Chain-gang chants, military cadences, sea shanties: humans have long paired music making with intense physical exercise. Now research confirms the power of the combination: working out seems easier while producing music, according to a small study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

In the study, half of the participants made music while working out by using software that turned their movements into tunes. These exercisers exerted equal force while pumping iron as did people who merely listened to music during exercise. Yet the music makers used less oxygen during their routine—a measure of exertion— and they also felt they were working less hard than those who just listened.

Music production may make exercise easier by activating so-called emotional motor control, posits Thomas Fritz, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the study’s lead researcher. Emotional motor control is responsible for spontaneous actions such as a genuine smile; deliberate motor control, in contrast, implements purposeful action (such as a fake smile). Activating this more efficient system, Fritz says, may be as easy as singing along or pumping iron in rhythm with the tunes in your exercise playlist. So time to hum along with your playlist while you are jogging…..

 

Pain Presto Relief

Forget grapes and ‘Get Well Soon’ cards—hospitals may soon begin handing their patients MP3 players to speed their recovery. A study at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge determined that ambient music therapy had a positive effect on postoperative patients’ recovery by improving pain management and decreasing the negative effects of environmental noise.

In this study, patients who had undergone surgery for cancer all received standard nursing care. Half of them also got a preprogrammed MP3 player with ambient music—songs without words, played at less than 60 decibels—and were encouraged by nurses to listen for at least half an hour after they took their twice-daily medication. Before treatment, all the patients had similar levels of anxiety, pain and irritation at the amount of environmental noise. Three days later patients who listened to the ambient music said they were able to better manage their pain and were less annoyed by hospital noise, whereas patients without music experienced no change, according to the study in Nursing last fall. Many of us already turn to music to help with emotional pain; these findings suggest we might want to try listening as a salve for physical pain, too.

 

Music Helps Children Read

Today a symphony of research trumpets the many links among language, reading and music, including several that reveal a connection between rhythm and reading skills. Nina Kraus of Northwestern University has discovered a possible explanation: the brains of good beat keepers respond to speech more consistently than the brains of people whose toes do not tap in time. After testing 124 adolescents for beat-keeping ability, the researchers used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to eavesdrop on teen brains as the consonant sound “da” was played repeatedly. With every “da,” the brains of beat keepers responded consistently, even when there was background noise or while they watched television. The brain waves of poor beat keepers, however, were all over the place. The study helps to explain why music may hold a key to improved reading. Because reading ability, in general, relies on making a connection between the sounds of letters and symbols on a page, music provides another avenue into learning. Through music, you learn to pay attention to important sounds. The inconsistent sound processing shown by the poor beat keepers makes that difficult. If you have an auditory system that automatically is able to efficiently pull out sounds that are meaningful, it’s going to be important not just for music but for speech.

 

Fighting Poverty with Pianos

Scientists have observed that reading ability links with socioeconomic status. Yet music might help close the gap, according to Nina Kraus (the same lady as above) and her colleagues at Northwestern University.

Kraus’s team tested the auditory abilities of teenagers aged 14 or 15, grouped by socioeconomic status (as indexed by their mother’s level of education, a commonly used surrogate measure). The researchers recorded the kids’ brain waves with EEG as they listened to a repeated syllable against soft background sound and when they heard nothing. They found that children of mothers with a lower education had noisier, weaker and more variable neural activity in response to sound and greater activity in the absence of sound. The children also scored lower on tests of reading and working memory.

Kraus thinks music training is worth investigating as a possible intervention for such auditory deficits. The brains of trained musicians differ from non-musicians, and they also enjoy a range of auditory advantages, including better speech perception in noise, according to research from Kraus’s laboratory. The researchers admit that this finding could be the result of preexisting differences that predispose some people to choose music as a career or hobby, but they point out that some experimental studies show that musical training, whether via one-on-one lessons or in group sessions, enhances people’s response to speech.

Most recently Kraus’s group has shown that these effects may last. Kraus surveyed 44 adults aged 55 to 76 and found that four or more years of musical training in childhood was linked to faster neural responses to speech, even for the older adults who had not picked up an instrument for more than 40 years. Maybe time to go and pick up my clarinet and oboe again during the summer months…..?

 

Alleviating Alzheimer’s

Many studies have found that familiar songs enhance mood, relieve stress and reduce anxiety in patients with Alzheimer’s, perhaps because musical memory is often spared even when a patient has declined to a low level of cognition. Two new studies find that familiar music also improves cognitive symptoms in the disease.

Familiar music may be a safe and effective way to help patients with Alzheimer’s become more self-conscious, which improves overall mental processing and leads to a more accurate examination of the world.

In a study published in September 2013 by Eva Arroyo-Anlló of the University of Salamanca in Spain and her colleagues, patients listened to either familiar or unfamiliar music three times a week for three months. Those who heard tunes they knew showed an immediate improvement in identity, mood, moral judgment and body awareness—elements of self-consciousness that are adversely affected by Alzheimer’s. Those who listened to unfamiliar music scored worse on all measures except body awareness.

The researchers also administered a common exam for dementia to test the patients’ overall cognition. The group who heard familiar music sustained their scores over time, whereas the group who listened to unfamiliar music faltered significantly. According to the investigators, these findings are yet one more reason that caregivers should provide patients with music from their past.

One of the most devastating aspects of Alzheimer’s is its effect on patients’ ability to recall life events. Several studies have found that music helps to strengthen these individuals’ autobiographical memories, and a paper in the November 2013 Journal of Neurolinguistics builds on these findings by exploring the linguistic quality of those recollections.

Researchers instructed 18 patients with Alzheimer’s and 18 healthy control subjects to tell stories from their lives in a silent room or while listening to the music of their choice. Among the Alzheimer’s patients, the music-cued stories contained a greater number of meaningful words, were more grammatically complex and conveyed more information per number of words. Music may enhance narrative memories because music and language processing share a common neural basis.