Why listening to music is good

Research at the University of Helsinki showed that stroke patients who listened to music they chose themselves for two hours a day had significantly improved recovery of cognitive function compared to those who listened to audio books or were given no listening material.

Stroke is the number 5 cause of death in the United States. If you know someone who has suffered a stroke, bring their favorite songs as soon as you can. Listening to them can significantly ramp up their recuperation. Other research found that musically trained adult women and musically trained children outperformed those without music training on verbal memory tests. Research shows that taking music lessons predicts higher academic performance and IQ in young children. In one study, 6-year-olds who took keyboard or singing lessons in small groups for 36 weeks had significantly larger increases in IQ and standardized educational test results than children who took either drama lessons or no lessons.

The singing group did the best. To help your children achieve academic excellence, encourage them to sing or learn to play an instrument. We sing so we can hear ourselves live. A study with healthy older adults found that those with ten or more years of musical experience scored higher on cognitive tests than musicians with one to nine years of musical study. The non-musicians scored the lowest. Business magnate Warren Buffet stays sharp at age 84 by playing ukulele.

It reduces stress and anxiety , lifts your mood, boosts your health, helps you sleep better, takes away your pain, and even makes you smarter. Rather than cut funds for music and art programs in schools, why not invest in exploring all the secret places that music reaches so that we may continue to reap its amazing benefits?

Facebook Twitter. The next time you feel low, put on some classical or meditative music to lift your spirits. Memorize these results. You now have a strategy to study more effectively for your next test. Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory.

Experts are trying to understand how our brains can hear and play music. A stereo system puts out vibrations that travel through the air and somehow get inside the ear canal. These vibrations tickle the eardrum and are transmitted into an electrical signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where it is reassembled into something we perceive as music. Johns Hopkins researchers have had dozens of jazz performers and rappers improvise music while lying down inside an fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to watch and see which areas of their brains light up.

When 13 older adults took piano lessons, their attention, memory and problem-solving abilities improved, along with their moods and quality of life. Try these methods of bringing more music—and brain benefits—into your life. Listen to what your kids or grandkids listen to, experts suggest.

It might not feel pleasurable at first, but that unfamiliarity forces the brain to struggle to understand the new sound. When I gave birth to my first-born, I listened to CDs of classical music in the hospital. I figured that music would help calm me and distract me from the pain. You might use music to distract yourself from painful or stressful situations, too.

Though you may sense that music helps you feel better somehow, only recently has science begun to figure out why that is. Neuroscientists have discovered that listening to music heightens positive emotion through the reward centers of our brain, stimulating hits of dopamine that can make us feel good, or even elated.

Listening to music also lights up other areas of the brain—in fact, almost no brain center is left untouched—suggesting more widespread effects and potential uses for music. My choice to bring music into the birthing room was probably a good one. Research has shown that listening to music—at least music with a slow tempo and low pitch, without lyrics or loud instrumentation—can calm people down, even during highly stressful or painful events.

Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels—all biological markers of stress. In one study , researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain.

In another study involving surgery patients, the stress reducing effects of music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug. Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect. In a recent study , premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music—either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist—three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU.

Music has a unique ability to help with pain management, as I found in my own experience with giving birth. In a study , sixty people diagnosed with fibromyalgia—a disease characterized by severe musculoskeletal pain—were randomly assigned to listen to music once a day over a four-week period.

In comparison to a control group, the group that listened to music experienced significant pain reduction and fewer depressive symptoms.

In another recent study , patients undergoing spine surgery were instructed to listen to self-selected music on the evening before their surgery and until the second day after their surgery.