Ed Sheeran’s music makes us curl into a ball and long for a love we’ve never experienced (or maybe that is just me), Beyonce’s makes us want to throw our hands up and forget about any problems, and You Belong With Me, by Taylor Swift, throws us into childhood nostalgia. You may begin to question how music can evoke such a variety of emotions, and well, this happens because listening to music changes the blood flow throughout your body.
To understand how this works, let’s look at the basics of the brain. There is no specific region of the brain where emotions are experienced or memories are formed, but in fact, different areas are responsible for encoding, processing, and recalling it. The hippocampus, part of the limbic system, is mostly associated with memory, but what many people do not know is how influential it is to emotions. The limbic system is located in the temporal lobe of the brain; the hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus, and hypothalamus are the main structures that make it up. In this article, I will be focusing on the amygdala and hippocampus, as these are the most influential to emotional responses.
It’s funny that the amygdala, a tiny bean-shaped gland, controls such intense emotions of fear and rage while the hippocampus acts as a “loading dock” for long term memory storage by tying emotional responses to it. The hippocampus and amygdala work together in harmony through neural communication to produce a reaction to stimuli. The craziest part about this, in my opinion, is that each person’s response is different, as the outcome is dependent on previous experience to similar stimuli. Take this for an example, two people are presented with the same dog. Person A backs away and stays wary of the dog while Person B rushes to pet it. After reading about emotional responses, can you explain why two completely opposite reactions occur in the same situation?
Now that you understand the basics of emotional response to stimuli, we can devel into music’s effect on the brain.
Music causes a variety of physical and mental responses: changing of respiration rate, heart rate, blood pressure, emotional response, hormonal influx, etc (MacDonald). All of these changes occur because of the shift of blood flow in the brain and the release of neurotransmitters. The eight main neurotransmitters are acetylcholine (Ach), dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), adrenaline, endorphins, and glutamate, although all of these are vital to emotions, I will only explain the effect of dopamine and serotonin on the brain. Serotonin is a chemical that is responsible for the feeling of satisfaction during an anticipated scenario (an easy way to remember this is the “s” in “serotonin” stands for “satisfaction”); dopamine is a chemical that releases feelings of pleasure in new situations. Unlike serotonin, dopamine follows a pathway called the mesolimbic system, which transports dopamine from the ventral tegmental area (VTA), nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and the hippocampus, in order to be experienced. Do you remember what effect the amygdala and hippocampus have on emotional responses?
Whether you find rock, indie, or hip-hop music to be pleasant, a neurotransmitter will be released. The genre and the amount of pleasure music brings will impact what gets delivered. Serotonin levels dictate how much satisfaction is experienced. A study in 2000, conducted by Stephan Evers and Birgit Surhs, explains that when participants experienced pleasant music their serotonin levels increased significantly, and when they heard unpleasant music the levels decrease (MacDonald). A similar study proved the same thing, but with levels of dopamine in the presence of enjoyable music. The music activated the mesolimbic system and produced a reward-like feeling to the participants (MacDonald). The type of music listened to really can uplift or enhance a current feeling experienced due to the production of neurotransmitters.
After learning the basics of the brain and music’s influence on chemicals, it is finally time to explain how blood can change its path based on music. Have you ever seen goosebumps on your body or felt a shiver run down your spine when listening to music? If so, then you have experienced some blood leaving the lower part and flowing to the front of the brain. Zatroree and Blood discovered this in their 2001 study that monitored the regional cerebral blood flow, or rCBF, with PET scan technology. They conduced that the intensity or even presence of a chill (an extreme emotional reaction) is a result of the movement of blood, or reduced rCBF, from the amygdala and hippocampus and an increase of rCBF to the orbitofrontal and cingulate cortex (MacDonald). It makes sense to notice an increase in blood flow in those cortexes, as they are key to the reward and pleasure system of the brain. Wherever blood is flowing, the correlating emotional response will be reciprocated.
Through shifts in blood flow and chemically induced responses, music does have the ability to create and change our moods. So the next time you catch yourself feeling on top of the world or sulking about your ex after listening to something, know that the artist has effectively altered your mind.
References
MacDonald, Raymond A. R., et al. Music, Health, and Wellbeing. Oxford University Press, 2013.
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