"This Is Your Brain on Music"

To answer the question, Levitin and his colleagues used an advanced technique known as "functional and effective connectivity analysis" to follow how music moves through the brain. What they discovered was startling. Contrary to long-held assumptions, the cerebellum did turn out to play a role in some emotions -- particularly the way we derive pleasure from the rhythm, or groove, of a piece of music. When we listen to a song, our ears send signals not only to the auditory cortex, the region of the brain that processes the sound, but also straight to the cerebellum. When a song begins, Levitin says, the cerebellum, which keeps time in the brain, "synchronizes" itself to the beat. Part of the pleasure we find in music is the result of something like a guessing game that the brain then plays with itself as the beat continues. The cerebellum attempts to predict where beats will occur. Music sounds exciting when our brains guess the right beat, but a song becomes really interesting when it violates the expectation in some surprising way -- what Levitin calls "a sort of musical joke that we're all in on." Music, Levitin writes, "breathes, speeds up, and slows down just as the real world does, and our cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized."

But it's not just the cerebellum that perks up to songs. What's interesting about how our brains respond to music -- rather than, say, language -- is the large number of systems that are activated by the experience. In addition to the cerebellum, music taps into the frontal lobes (a "higher-order" region that processes musical structure), and it also activates the mesolimbic system, which Levitin explains is "involved in arousal, pleasure, the transmission of opiods and the production of dopamine." This is why certain music can feel so pleasurable, producing such deep emotions -- it's simultaneously operating on various parts of our brains, and the response is something on the order of taking a hit of heroin.

Clearly, though, we don't all find pleasure in the same music -- and what determines whether we end up loving Billy Corgan, Billy Idol, Billie Holiday or Billy Shatner is mostly a matter of what we listen to when when we're young. Studies suggest that we start listening to and remembering music in the womb (but playing Mozart to your baby, and indeed playing Mozart to yourself, will not make you smarter -- studies showing that famous effect have largely been debunked). Humans prefer music of their own culture when they're toddlers, but it's in our teens that we choose the specific sort of music that we'll love forever. These years, Levitin explains, are emotional times, "and we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to 'tag' the memories as something important." In addition, our brains are undergoing massive changes up until the teen years -- after that, the brain structure becomes more fixed, and it begins to prune, rather than grow, neural connections. Consequently it's in our teens that we're most receptive to new kinds of music (in much the same way it's easier to learn a new language when you're young than when you're old). After that, you can of course find new stuff to love -- but there is a reason that there's such a thing as "your parent's music," and why, even though I can't get enough Paul Simon, I'm far more emotionally attached to my generation's music.

One more thing on the connection between memory and music bears mentioning, if only for the name: the "earworm." This word, from the German "ohrwurm," describes the annoying feeling of having a song stuck in your head. Alas, Levitin says relatively little research has been done on the phenomenon -- all we really know is that musicians and people with obsessive compulsive disorder are more prone to getting earworms, and that for most people it's small bits of songs, rather than entire songs, that we keep repeating. And if it seems more common that terrible songs get stuck in your head, that might be because bad songs -- and commercial jingles -- are the ones with the simplest phrases. (If you do not want to be infected with an earworm named KFed, do not click here.)

There is compelling support, Levitin says, for the idea that our brains evolved to respond to music in this way; in other words, it is no accident -- and rather it's by evolutionary design -- that we are so good at processing music. One bit of evidence is the ubiquity of music across cultures, and across history. "No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music," Levitin notes. More than that, we are amazingly good -- nearly magical, when you consider how much better we are than even supercomputers -- at processing sounds. For instance, your brain can instantly spot a transformation -- that is, another version -- of a song, even if the two are radically different. John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" varies in tempo, pitch, instrumentation and countless other ways from the Rodgers and Hammerstein, "Sound of Music" version, but you know the two as the same song; the same is true for OutKast's funked-out, hip-hop "My Favorite Things." Computers simply cannot do this; our brains are uniquely efficient at such complex pattern-matching tasks.

But why would humans have evolved to become musical creatures? Among evolutionary biologists, there is great controversy over this question -- and, indeed, over whether musical ability was "selected for," or whether it occurred as an accident of other advances during evolution. But Levitin proposes several reasons why music might have been important to humans over the long sweep of history. Making and listening to music is a social activity, and could thus have improved cohesion among members of the species. "Music may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony" in ancient societies, Levitin writes. Singing around the campfire, way back in the day, "might have been a way to stay awake, to ward off predators, and to develop social coordination and social cooperation within the group."

Music might also serve as a precursor to more advanced cognitive tasks, especially speech. We know that when kids learn to speak, they don't do so by memorization of every word and phrase -- rather they learn the rules of a language, and then try to apply those rules to new contexts. One way we might learn how to use such rules is through music. "Music for the developing brain is a form of play," Levitin writes, "preparing the child to eventually explore generative language development through babbling, and ultimately more complex linguistic and paralinguistic productions."

Finally there is that most important thing about music: its connection to love, or, more specifically, to arousal and mating. Unlike birds and whales, humans don't produce musical mating calls. But as social animals, humans need strategies to attract potential mates, and music might have been an important part of the process. "As a tool for activation of specific thoughts, music is not as good as language," Levitin writes. But "as a tool for arousing feelings and emotions, music is better than language." If you want your potential mate to remember you, you serenade her, or at least get Peter Gabriel to do it.

This is obvious -- that music elicits emotion better than speech is something we all understand. It's why movies have soundtracks, and it's why couples have favorite songs. "You gotta hear this," Natalie Portman tells Zach Braff in "Garden State," playing him the fine Shins' song "New Slang." "It'll change your life." The scene is more touching than gushy because, of course, it's true: it's not always the Shins, but music does change your life. At the end, they fall in love.

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