How to Use Music to Boost Motivation, Mood & Improve Learning
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor neurobiology, and opened ology at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing music in your brain.

However, this episode could have just as easily been entitled music is your brain or your brain is music. And that's because music, believe that are not, is a neurological phenomenon. Most of us think of music is something that happens outside of us.

The sounds we hear, the lyrics we hear, their meaning, how they anchor us to pieces of our history, both emotional or social. IT turns out that when we listen to music, IT activates nearly every piece of our brain. Moreover, when we listen to music, IT activates our brain in ways that our brain itself, and indeed our body as well, help to create that music at the level of so called neural on subs, that is, the firing of neurons.

In other words, when we listen to music, our brain in our body become part of the instrument that contributes our perception of that music. Today, i'm going to make clear how all of that happens. We will also discuss how music can be leveraged towards a shifting our brain states and our bodily states, for instance, what sorts of music to listen to in order to make ourselves happy.

Yes, studies have been done on that, as well as how long to listen to music in order to shift our mood or our overall bodily state, including how to process feelings of sadness. Many of you are probably familiar with particular songs that ankus to particular times in our history or people in our history. And there's an age old question really as to whether not listening to sad music can help us process our feelings of sadness, or whether not they drive us further down the spiral of sadness and despair.

And indeed, studies have explored this as well. So today I will explain how music, indeed, how different types of music, activate different neural circuits in your brain to create different brain and bodily states, how we can leverage music toward things like emotional processing, shifting our emotions, as well as to enhance learning and memory. And we will also talk about the use of music to enhance brain plasticity, that is, your brain's ability to change in response to experience, not just in response to that music, but rather using music as a tool to expand our capacity for neuroplasticity, giving us the ability to learn far more in other context in areas of life.

I confessed in researching this episode. I found myself continually delighted as to, first of all, how impressive the science of the study of music in the brain is, and secondly, how fundamental music is to all of our lives. And this is true whether or not you're somebody who listens to music often or or somebody really prefer silence.

Indeed, we will talk about whether not it's Better to listen to music or remain in silence when you perform certain kinds of work. IT turns out that there is a very clear answer to that. If you want a little bit of a hint, IT is best to listen to music in the between bouts of work or during brief rest periods, as opposed to listening to music while you work.

And for those of you that listen to music while you work and thrilly enjoy listening to music while you work, we will also discuss what that means about your brain, in particular, because it's likely that I got wired up that way, a particular phase of development. And each and all of you can learn today how to best leverage music toward productivity, but perhaps equally important, how to leverage music for enrichment and enjoyment of life. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element.

Element is an electrode drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium, the so called electronic and no sugar. Now salt, magnesium um in peason are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons.

In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electro lights need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits and cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back to electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrates my body and make sure I have enough electroliers.

And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja sessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP, turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate.

And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different type of yoga ea sessions, those you don't know. Yoga eeda is a process of line very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations.

And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even which is a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up that com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial.

Okay, let's talk about music and your brain. And to start off, I just want to take a step back and acknowledge something that is absolutely remarkable about music, which is, if you think about language, I could describe to you a glass. I could describe you an apple.

I could describe to you a story. I could describe to you a face. I could describe you any number of different things, and you could do the same. For me, language is essentially infinite in the number of things that I can explain in the ways that I can explain IT.

And yet, if you think about music, music provided there, no lyrics in that music can't explain how a glasses shaped IT can even tell you that there's a glass present in the room or on a table. IT can't tell you what a face looks like. I can't tell you what that person who owns that face did or is doing.

So in some ways, you might think wow music is fairly diminished in terms of its quality, ative depth compared to language. And yet, if you take a step back and think about what music can do, it's astonishing. And IT actually overwhelms what language can do, what can music do? Well, even in the absence of any lyrics, any words put to music, music can describe in emotion.

In fact, music can describe numerous types of emotions, and they can do IT with a lot of nuances. So not just displayed for us, happy or sad, but rather different degrees of happiness, different degrees of sadness. Music can be used to convey a sense of longing, a sense of nostalgia, a sense of delight, a sense of awe, and on and on.

So whether music can describe nouns very well, IT can beautifully describe emotions. And not only can music describe emotions with a tremendous degree of nuances, music can evoke emotions with a tremendous degree of nuance. Now, this is spectacular, and it's not only spectacular.

IT is important because as we move through today's episode, you'll soon come to realize that is very likely, and indeed, we have a lot of scientific evidence to support the fact that music evolved prior to spoke in language. Moreover, it's very likely that singing evolved prior to spoke in language and that music, singing and dance together evolved prior to language, making music as well as singing and dance. But really just music, even on its own, in the absence of any lyrics or any bodily movement as the fundamental form of human communication.

Indeed, music can evoke empathy. Again, we're talking about music in the absence of any lyrics. And when I say music can evoke empathy, i'm not talking about the sort of empathy where you look at somebody and not and understand so called cognitive empathy, which is important, by the way, in relational dynamics or emotional empathy, where you actually feeling what the other person is feeling.

But of course, you never really know what somebody else is feeling. How could you? You can only have a sense of what they might be feeling and you have a sense of what you're feeling.

But let's be honest, as one of our prior guests on the human in life podcast after a cal dare off, so apple noted, rarely do we ever understand how anyone else truly feels, because indeed, rarely do we ever understand how we ourselves truly feel. And certainly with language, it's very hard to explain our feelings with words in a way that can convey the way that we feel, with the kind of nuance that represents our own reality. Even in a state of extreme happiness or extreme sadness, words fall short of explaining how we feel inside.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier, music not only can describe emotions, I can evoke emotions within us. And in doing so, you can evoke emotions that give us a sense of empathy for the person playing the music, or simply for others in the world. And music can do that so powerfully, because not only does music come in through our ears, and we will talk about the process of how sound is converted into what we perceive as music, and a little bit, because indeed, IT comes through our ears, and we can hear that music, of course.

But the nerve cells, the neurons in your brain, as well as the nerve cells in your body can become activated by music. In a way that the firing of those neurons, literally the frequency of those neural impulses, comes to match the frequency of the sounds that you're hearing in your outside environment. In other way, when you listen to music, not only is that music coming into your body through your sense organs you're hearing, but your body itself is an instrument playing that music from within.

So for instance, if you listen to a piece of music that has a lightness to IT, that evokes a sense in you of the turning of the season from winter to spring, something that's common in certain classical music, but other forms of music as well, when you hear that music, indeed, it's coming in through your ears, but also the firing of the neurons in your brain and body responding to those particular frequencies of sound, is such that your body itself as an instrument playing, that sense of the turning of the seasons from winter or spring within you, which is why your body starts to feel lifted in some cases, or IT feel lightness in some cases. And the entire set of emotions starts to be that, at least for you, resemble the turning of the seasons from winter to spring. Now that may sound rather complex, but we're going to break that process down into its component parts.

But what I essentially just said is that when you listen to music, not only are you hearing that music, but your body, that is, your neurons, and indeed your hormones as well, things like oxide toxin and some other hormones in your brain and body that will discuss are contributing to a symphony of emotion from within your body and brain. Okay, so while music can't explain objects, IT can't describe them. I can explain, in a very nuance ways, emotions.

And I can evoke emotions within us. Now, if that's not amazing enough, music can not only describe an evoke emotions, IT can also imply in think, for instance, about drumming that you would hear off in the distance. And we're not talking about, we're talking drummer of this sort. And perhaps the cadence of that drummer changes such that, as is approaching IT, gets more and more frequent.

What is the intent being imployed? Well, we know from numerous studies, and you know from numerous movies that you have seen and heard that that sort of low frequency drumming of increasing cases as IT approaches is implying the intent of aggression or war, or at least is implying that something serious is going to happen. Now contrast that with a different frequency of sound played at a higher case, 等等等等。

Now the second set of towns that have done that, not done are far less clear in terms of what they mean, what their intent is. But if we contrast them with, let's just call them what they're typically called the war drums or the drums that that convey a sense of aggressive intent. Dm, dm, dm, what we create them is a jx opposition of two different emotional states in you, perhaps, or maybe you don't respond to those with any robust emotional shift, but we are conveying to separate or distinct sets of intent.

Now, of course, spoken language can convey intent. I could say, for instance, you know, i'm going to help you. How can I help you today? Or I could say, i'm gonna urt you, right? Of course, with spoken language, you could do that and you could change the international of that language, you could change the frequency.

So if I were to say i'm going to hurt you, it's very different than if I say i'm going to hurt you, okay? Or if I put this as a question, i'm going to hurt you. okay. So with language, of course, is also the opportunity for a lot of nuance, depending on where the inflections, where the accents are on a particular phrase, even a particular word. But with music, as you recall, when we convey a sense of intent, we are also conveying that sense of intent through the body of listener, not just bringing IT in through their ears.

And so when we do that, what we do is we start to recruit a huge number of neural circuits that are involved, not just in understanding or a sense of empathy for an emotion, but rather that can recruit movement, or what we call promoter circuits in the body. Promoter circuits are the neurons that start to fire before a particular pattern of action is generated. And so when we hear music that conveys emotion, that evokes emotion, and especially when we hear music that conveys a sense of intent from the outside, we too start to feel as if we need to move or respond to that music in a particular way.

Now, what I just described to you is not something that learned. In fact, IT is innate. How do we know that? Well, there are some beautiful studies that have explored how babies respond to music.

Indeed, how babies respond to specific types of music, special, frequently, spacing between particular note and on and on. It's been demonstrated, for instance, that babies as Young as three months old respond to music very differently than they respond to just other forms of sound scrambled in time. Now, of course, babies that are three months old aren't speaking.

So you could ask them, does that sound like music? How does that make you feel that set up? They're not going to answer, at least not with any coherence, because they don't have a spoken language yet.

But despite the absence of language, we know that babies as Young as three months old respond to music because they do so with rythmic movements of their bodily limbs and actually their torso as well. Now a little bit later, we will touch on this issue of what types of music evoke movement of the torso versus movement of the limbs versus movement of the torso and limbs. No, i'm not going to dance for you during this podcast. However, there's a really interesting story there that relates to how primitive or evolved the motor neurons, the neurons that actually move the muscular or are, and how primitive were evolved. The music that one listens to is.

But just to give you a sense where that headed in the study, where they examined the responses of very Young babies to music, they found is that certain frequencies of sound evoked movements in those babies that were rythmic, where IT was mostly their torso moving back and forth, maybe they are head a little bit as other patterns of sound, different frequencies in different arrangements, evoke movement of their limbs more than their torso, and still other patterns of sounds evoked movement of their torso, limbs and head in others. Ds, babies dancing, and if you've ever been to a wedding or a party or been out dancing, you will see people who include more torso versus lib, versus lib and torso movement when they dance. And yes, of course, some of this relates to proficiency and dancing comfort on the dance floor at sara.

But there are some universal rules out there about how certain frequencies and patterns of sound, A K music, evokes different types of bodily movements. So starting from a very Young age, prior to any instruction in terms of how to dance or what music is, babies are dancing to music. And that highlights an important point that we will return to again and again throughout today's episode, which is that the systems of the brain that respond specifically to movement, not just sound, but specifically to musical sound, are intimately tied to the neural circuits of the body, the generate movement.

And this is specially important. Understand, when we get into our discussion about music and our sense of motivation. Okay, so the list of incredible things that music can evoke within us by way of how IT activites our nervous system in body is starting to grow. We've talked about how music can convey emotion, how music can evoke emotion, and how music can convey a sense of intent as well. Now as how music can generate action within us, this is a pretty spectacular list if you think about IT.

In addition, music causes changes within our bodily physiology that extends beyond the nervous system, although he has a relationship to the nervous system in particular, they're been a lot of studies that have explorer how music changes things like our blood pressure or how fast our heart is beating our so called resting heart rate. And here we've made some important discoveries in recent years. And when I say we, I don't mean my laboratory, I mean laboratories that focus on the relationship between music and our bodily physiology, because we've long known that music can change various health metrics.

There are some really nice studies, and i'll link to one or two of the media analysis of these studies in the shown note captions that have showed that if people listen to anywhere from ten to thirty minutes of music per day, and by the way, the selection of music in these studies ranged everything from rocks and roll to classical musi C2Country mus ic, typically these studies would ask subjects what their favorite music is, and then they would have them listen to that particular genre of music for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes per day. And if you look at the meta analysis of those studies, what you find is that almost all of them see some sort of significant effect, that is, some statistically significant shift in the bodily physiology of people that deliberately listen to music for ten to thirty minutes per day, not while doing anything else, but just listening to that music. They find, for instance, that their resting heart rate is reduced, if not during the period in which are listening to the music.

Then after the time in which they are listening to music, they find that they are so called. Heart rate variability tends to increase for those things that aren't familiar with hard rate variability. Having increased heart rate variability is a good thing, and that's because heart rate variability reflects the sort of pushing pull or the baLance, rather of the activation of the so called sympathetic nervous system, which is the one sometimes called the fighter flight system.

Although I don't really like no me nature, the sympathetic nervous system, by the way, not about emotional sympathy, is what drives your heart rate higher, tends to put us into activated states where we favor movement in motion and makes us alert where, as the parasympathetic aspect of our nervous system is the portion of our autonomic server system, sometimes called the rest of the digest system, the paris synthetic nerve system drive states of deeper relaxation of calm. In any event, heart rate variability reflects a period breaking, a slowing down of heart rate and breathing and other aspects of our neural system function that works a longside with sympathetic activation. Think of sympathetic activation is an accelerator per sympathetic activation is a break.

And when heartfree very ability is higher, IT reflects the fact that our paris sympathetic nerve system is periodically engaging. It's getting activated and slowing our heart rate, slowing our breathing down. Music seems to have the effect of activating that very sympathetic aspect of our nervous system.

And so we are pumping the break every once, and while slowing down our heart, slowing down our breathing. In other words, when people listen to music. For a dedicated period of time each day of about ten to thirty minutes, some studies looked at as much as sixty minutes, but typically ten to thirty minutes. What one finds is that heart rate variability increases not just during the period when they're listening to the music. This is very important, but also heartless.

Ate variability increased around the clock in those subjects, even during sleep, making listening to ten to thirty minutes of your favorite music each day, not just what I would think to be an enjoyable protocol, if you could even call IT a protocols so enjoyable to listen your favorite music that that feels almost inappropriate to all IT a protocol, because protocol sounds kind of ridge like you're imposing that on yourself. But if you need an excuse to listen to your favorite music for ten to thirty, maybe sixty minutes per day, and just attending to that music, not while doing anything else, which is what these studies had, subjects do well indeed. That's been shown to increase heart rate, very beauty around the clock, which we know is beneficial for your mental and physical health more generally.

Okay, so there are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies that have explored how music impacts our physiology. And as I just mentioned, IT seems that if we listen to music that we like for tend to thirty may be sixty months a day. Our physio gy, certain health metrics s Harry variable building particular improve.

Now, in light of the positive effects of listening to music on one's health, there is a recent metal analysis that I found particularly interesting. The title, this meta analysis is effects of music on the cardiovascular lar system, and that was published in trends in cardiovascular medicine. Now from the title of this paper effects of music on the cardigans lar system, you might think that it's just yet another meet analysis expLoring how music impacts heart revalidation and things of that sort.

But what's interesting about this study is that IT identifies that the way in which listening to one's favorite music positively impacts the cardiovascular system in other aspects of our physiology is very likely not through direct changes on our heart rate simply by listening to music, but rather through changes in our breathing. And this is true even if people were not singing along with the music, by the way. Now, relationship between breathing and heart rate is something that i've touched on before, but if you haven't heard me discuss this, i'm just going to briefly tell you the relationship in two or three sentences, and then i'll explain the mechanism also about two to three sentences.

So if you have a background in biology, or even if you don't, this will all be very simple and very clear when you deliberately inhale with a lot of vigor, or you deliberately make your in hill longer than you naturally would. So for indentify breathing very vigorously through my nose, something very specific happens to your heart rate IT increases, whether when you deliberately excel, meaning when you x hail and deliberately make that x hail longer, or you deliberately add figure to that x sale, or even a shorter, deliberate, more vigors XL, you slow down your heart rate. And that's because of a phenomenon called respiratory sinus, a rythmic, which, because he includes the word a rithmetic, sounds like a bad thing, but it's actually a wonderful thing and has to do with the relationship between a particular muscle in your body called the dire frame, which, when you inhale, our lungs filled with air or die, friend moves down, and our heart therefore has a little bit more space.

IT actually gets bigger, temporarily bigger, but bigger. And when he does that, whatever volume of blood is in the heart is now moving through a larger space. So it's the same amount of blood moving through a larger space.

And the nervous system registers that as the blood moving more slowly through that temporarily in large heart. And as a consequence, there's a signal sent through various stations to the nerve system to the heart to speed the heart up. In other words, just as I said before, when we inhale, our heart rate speeds up.

Conversely, when we x hail, our lungs empty out some, our diagram moves up. And as a consequence of that, there's a less space for the heart. Our heart temporarily becomes smaller. And when that happens, the volume of blood within that smaller heart moves more quickly.

And that's detected by the nervous system, which then triggers a neural signal from the parasympathetic ARM of the automation ic over system, which is just fancy nerd speak for a neural signals st to your heart every time you explain to slow your heart down. So the well establish effects of listening to your favorite ite music. Increasing your heart rate variability is not a direct interaction between the sounds coming in through your years and changes in your heart rate while you're listening to the music.

That's actually what I would have thought happened, but this more recent metal analysis pulls apart. The variables in these different studies really illustrates that when we are listening to music, we are subconsciously, most of times subconsciously, changing our patterns of breathing. We are inhaling and anticipation of certain things happening in the music.

We're exhaling. When we feel a relief of attention, we get excited. We may get sad. We may get happy. We may even just be listening to music that we don't think is impacting our physiology at such a core level. But indeed, IT is music is able to round international system levels below our conscious awareness and literally turn the various jobs, if you will, of our cardiovascular system, of our breathing apparatus, the dire frame, the longs IT can evoke, respirable sinai, remember, which again, sounds like a terrible thing, but is actually the reflection of a healthy nervous system in heart. And in doing so, yes, IT increases heart rate variability, something that is beneficial to all of us, but is doing so by changing our patterns of breathing.

So if you've ever wondered why music can change how you feel so robustly, well, it's doing that at a foundational level of your nervous system, indeed, at the levels of your nervous system that typically are not in your consciousness warehouse. Because I ve ve to imagine that most of you are probably not losing your music. Think, here comes that one corus, or here comes that one Melody.

And this is where I always x hail, or this is where I I always hold my breath. This sort of thing. No, most people are just listening to music.

It's coming in through their years. They're experiencing some boys sensations. Maybe they are moving their torso, arms, maybe arms and tour.

So maybe not moving at all, no dancing, maybe just listening within your head or maybe it's just dropped into the background below your conscious warehouse at all. And yet that music is communicating emotion. It's evoking emotion.

It's communicating intent. It's activating those promoter circuits that would have you move, if I could, and we'll talk about dance a little bit later. But even if you're not dancing, even if you're not swing the tiny little bit, your patterns of breathing are changing.

And through respiratory sinus a thoma, your heart rate is changing. And through changes in your heart rate, your heart rate variability is increasing. So if ever you wanted a tooler protocol that was easy to use but could positively impact your mental and physical health while listening to your favorite music for ten to thirty, maybe sixty minutes, maybe more per day, is that protocol?

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic c drink that covers all of your foundation tional nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that we're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for god. Health, our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiota health.

In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations in vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And IT tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea.

And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d three k two. Again, that's a letter Greenstock comes slash huberman en to get the five free travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two. So hopefully it's becoming clear just how absolutely powerful music is at evoking different physiological responses within you that is within your brain and body.

But there's an additional one that I find particularly interesting because IT addresses and indeed answers one of the most common questions that I received all the time, which is how can I get more motivated, not how I, Andrew, can get more motivated. All, of course, I asked myself that question from time to time, although admittedly most of time i'm wondering how i'm just going to get everything I need to get done, done. But I often get the question, how can I feel more motivated or what can I do to sustain my motivation over time? And you know, we hear a lot of different strategies about how to do that.

We hear about the and quote, just do IT strategy, the incredible slogan that nike created um and that persisted this day um has become common place in culture. And indeed, that just do IT a form of a device ah can be a good one but for a lot of people, uh just hearing just do IT or telling themselves just do IT is not something that can evoke action in them uh other people will listen to motivation speeches. They'll look at motivational videos, they'll read motivational books, um they may even hire coaches.

In other words, people invest a ton of time, energy and money into trying to be more motivated. And indeed, a number of episodes of the huberman and lab podcast have focused on the relationship between a motivation drive and the new modulator doping. We have several episodes about that as well as a tooker, all of which are available.

Les, zero cost at huberman lab economy can access those easily by putting motivation into the search function that you woman lived ed out com. All of that will come up time stamp at sea. But perhaps surprisingly, today's conversation about music offers us a particularly poor tool to increase motivation.

And that's because one of the fundamental properties of listening to music is that IT evokes activation of these promoter and motor circuits within our brain and body, that is, the neural circuits whose specific job is to mobilize our body from its current position in state to a new position in state. So for those of you that listen to music while you work out or prior to when you work out, you are definitely on to something. For those of you that don't, that's fine.

To what i'm going to describe now are the specific sets of neural circuits that listening to music activate. As I mentioned earlier, listening to activates so many circuits throughout the brain and body that really one can take a step back from the sciences c literal on this and say, anytime someone has done to study where human beings listen to music and people record from particular brain area, believed not even from the old factory system, from the system in the brain responsible for smell. There seems to be some significant shift in terms of the neural firing there, the release of neurochemicals, which on the one hand, might need you to conclude that listening to music is just sort of a non specific generalized activators of nervous system function that is going like turning all the lights on.

But that's not the case. Music, in fact, is activating different neural circuits differently in time and space to evoke a whole set of specific reactions in your brain and body, but not the least of which is the propensity for you to move. And this is something that you can leverage, and indeed, or described a protocol by which you can leverage music in order to greatly increase your state of motivation.

okay. So this is the portion of today's episode what we're going to discuss, some specific neural circuits. But I want to assure you that if you're a neutral logic, you can understand this if you are not in your biology.

In fact, if you took no biology ever in your life, i'm going to make IT clear and easy for you to understand. As I mentioned before, when we hear music, IT activates many, many circuits throughout the brain body. When I say circuit S, I mean neurons and nerve cells that communicate with one another sort of chains of reactions.

When I say respond to one another, what I mean is when neurons are cortical activated, they release chemicals. Those chemicals are called neurotransmitters, things like glue to mate gaba. There are also called no modulators, things like dopamine, serotonin.

The names don't really matter for sake of today's discussion, but what those things do is they influence the likelihood that the next neuron will be active or less active. Okay, so neuron speak the language, if you will, of electricity, cause that's how they evoke release of these chemicals in chemistry. They vomit out these chemicals.

Those chemicals then bind to little parking spots on the next neuron called receptors, and then the next on gets activated electrically, and then to the next neon and next neon and so on. It's a chain of electric chemical reactions. okay.

So there's your newer science one to one lesson for today. When people listen to music, there is heightened activation of the so called frontal cortex. The area of your brain, which is on the surface below your school, but just behind your forehead, more less in that year of your brain, is involved in a lot of different things.

It's involved in understanding context. You know, what sort of behaviors and thoughts and actions are appropriate for given the environment, by the way, if any of you have ever been in an environment wherever one was really quiet, and you thought, oh gosh, what's keeping me from just blurting out my name right now, I was saying something totally an appropriate. Your frontal cortex is the one providing the the called top down inhibition on that impulse to blurt something inappropriate out.

And by the way, your thoughts about that impulse are perfectly Normal. They actually reflect a heighten sense of Normal sea um because IT means that your brain is thinking about how it's not going to do that and so therefore, you're not going to do that. Likewise, if you are ever at the edge of a hybrid, please stay on the safe side of the rAiling.

But if you think, oh my god ness, what's kept me from just jumping off the bridge right now, what's kept you from doing that is your frontal cortex. It's suppressing certain actions in a context dependent way, in particular actions that are dangerous to you, socially, physically, dangerous to others, socially, physically eta. Now, the frontal cortex, in order to do that, also has an incredible ability to make predictions.

So this is the function of the frontal cortex that I want to fox on for the moment. Your frontal cortex is great at doing that. If this, then that type of analysis.

If I say this, everyone will be offended, or if I say this, maybe they are laugh for if I don't say this, i'll be safe. If I do say that, I won't be safe. This kind of thing. Frontal cortex is activated when we listen to music, because within music there are some regularities. Sometimes these are described as motifs, or millions, or chooses.

Again, this is the entire landscape of discussion that we could have, and we will have with an expert test about how the mathematics of music impacts the electric chemical sydney within the brain and the coding, that is, the mathematics of rain function, which leads us to predict that certain things because they just happen, or likely to happen again, or not happen again. But let's set all aside for the moment and just stayed the simple fact, which is that when you listen to music, you're frontal cortex increases in activation because IT is predicting what you're going to hear next based on what you're currently hearing and what you heard before. Now I am from the generation that we didn't have ipods when I was a kid.

We did have cds, we did have tapes, but you had to fast forward or rewind a cassez tape, or you had to skip on the C. D. In order to move about the album in time. nowaday.

You can queue up different songs in different order really easily, but if you are somebody who listens to albums, start to finish, or if you like me and you grew up listening to albums, start to finish, maybe occasionally skipping a song, but you will be very familiar with this phenomenon, which is that right is a given song ends. If you familiar that album, you already anticipate the start of the next song in your head. And that just speaks to the predictive function that the frontal cortex plays.

So if you have a mixed tape with a bunch of different song, sure you don't expect one song of a given artist is to lead into the next. But if you're somebody who's listened to that mixtape a lot, so you familiar with what song comes next, or if you're listening to a given album, start to finish in your very familiar with IT, well, then you're immediately resonate with what i'm saying here, which is that your frontal cortex is always anticipating what sound is likely to come next. And this is very important because one of the key things about music and its ability to evoke our sense of surprise or delight through the release of a neural module latter called doping.

We get to this a bit more later is because that prediction machinery is thinking, oh, I heard that set of cords a moment ago. I'm going to hear IT again. And then when IT changes up your thing, oh, wo hold on.

That wasn't what I expected. And IT sometimes does that with a sense of delight like, ah yes. And sometimes IT here's that and he goes right once this I don't really like this that much.

I like the opener, that song, but I don't really like the rest. I think of that is certain payment ries muffin s in particular, where I really like the top. It's got the long chromes.

It's got the barriers and stuff that you like get down past the top and then you get to the middle thing you like all of the things not that good. Okay, there's certain songs like that for me. So I always saw those muffin songs because the top of the muffin is always the best, where as a dont is great the whole way through.

And now i'm going on attention because i'm thinking about muffins and donut, someone to take us back to music. But the point is relevant nevertheless, which is that your frontal cortex is making predictions. And when those predictions are broken, that's a sense of novelty.

And when that novelty is something that you like OK. So that evokes a sense of, yes, I like that. Well, then dopamine is deployed.

And when that novelty is something you don't like, typically there's a reduction in the amount of doping released in the separate set of brain circuits below whatever level of dopamine and have to be there prior or so called baseline level of dopamine. okay? So when you listen to music, there is a strong activation of the prediction machinery.

Your brain, there's also activation of the circuit is in your brain that register novelty. What are those circuits? These are things like the ventures tegmental area and the nuclear accumulation.

I've talked about this before on the podcast. Again, you don't need to know those names. Those are the names given to certain brain areas that control the release of dopamine in time according to whatever you happen to be experiencing in that moment.

okay. So the most olympic reward pathway could perhaps Better be called the most olympic reinforcement pathway. So for those of you out there shouting weight, the most olympic pathway IT is a bunch of other things is not just cope.

Mean, I agree, it's also sir tony is a bunch of other things. But for today's discussion, we're thinking about the misery's ic pathway as deploying dope, I mean, which IT does when we hear something novel, meaning not what we predicted and we like what we hear. And then there are a bunch of other brain centers and circuits that listening to music activates.

I just list off a few. Again, this isn't intended to confuse anybody. You're had a lot of useless snowmen creature. But since I am neuroscientist and this is a science and science and form tools podcast, i'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we get strong activation of a brain structure. Your ship, two of them, one on each side of the brain, called the amygdala.

This is a brain area, that part of a larger set of circuits that associated with arousal, okay, meaning becoming more alert, becoming more aware of our surroundings. And the particular sensory stimuli are coming in at the particular time, such as the notes of the music, or a particular set of lyrics. And music also activates areas of the brain, such as the para hippo camp formation, the cortex and the hippocampus itself, brain areas that encode and store memories.

And this is something that I think everyone will be familiar with when you hear certain songs, or even songs that sounds like certain songs, or even songs that you swear you've never heard before. IT can evoke a sense of nostalgia, of longing for something, of missing somebody, of sadness, or of delight and happiness, and positive memories of somebody or something. Indeed, I think it's fair to say that hearing particular pieces of music.

Particular songs, more than any other experience, can activate a whole library of memorial and emotions within us. And that's because of its ability to activate the paradip Campbell regions of the brain, the cortex that in the hip campus itself, again, several different brain areas, all which communicate with one another and other areas of the brain, in order to encode our memories, our sense of self, our sense of others, our sense of history, with those people in, on, in, on. Now, rather than just make this a catalog of different brain areas that music evokes, what i'm trying to do is spell out how music activating these different brain res is creating different components of what we are familiar with as our experience of music.

So frontal cortex prediction, these olympic reward pathway, novelty, a middle, a sense of emotion and arousal per hippocampus, cortex and cortex and hippocampus, our memories, in particular, our emotional memories and our location memories associated with a particular piece of music, right? Haven't you ever heard a song from let's a summer camp that you went to when you were a kid? Also, you remembering the smell of the grasses that that summer camp, remembering how some of the kids were really great and how some of the kids were really obnoxious ous.

You remembering some things that you did? Remember your councilors? I mean, there's just a whole landscape of neural information, their life information, storing your head, that hearing a particular song, that was song when you were, what? Eight years old? Ten years old, I can't just flips the lid on.

And IT comes guiderius remarkable. Now there are two other sets of brain circuits that are activated by music that deserve specific attention, and deserve that specific attention now in the context of discussing motivation and music ability to motivate us in particular ways. And those brain circuits are the basel ganga lia.

okay? So this is a set of circuits within the brain. They associate action initiation, so called go circuits, and withholding action so called no go circuits.

But basically, the basically ganger are involved in regulating movement. And the cereBellar. The cereBellar is sometimes refer to as the mini brain. IT looks like a little mini brain in the bottom, back of the human brain. And some species, the cereBellar is much larger relatives to the rest of the brain.

But in humans is like this little piece in the back that looks a little mini brain like you're Carrying a second brain back there that's I got mini brain cereBellar. It's involved in a lot of things, but one of its primary functions is to encode rythmic timing and processing, and along with its outputs to some deeper brainstem areas, things like the vestibule lar and coca nuclear. Talk about this, the airport nucleus, again, you don't need to know these names.

IT, meaning the cereBellar, along with a basis of ganglia, creates patterns of activity in our brain that cade down to particular circuits in our body. So these are so called promotor circuits and motor's circuits that generate the sense that we not only can move, but that we want to move and that we want to move in particular ways. So if you internalize nothing from the last five minutes or so in which i've been describing how music impacts your neural circuits in the brain, please do take away this important point, which is that when we listen to music, we think of that as an auditory experience.

But now, you know, that is also an emotional experience and and this is a very important. And when we listen to music, IT is programing a specific set of motor actions that are more likely to occur. Put differently, when we listen to music, we are more likely to move our body and not just dance, not just move our torso, our limbs or limbs and torso together in concert with the music, but rather move our body from its current position to another position.

And this is one of the most important things to understand about music. Music, despite being an auditory stimulus coming in through our years, evoke the activation of neural circuits in our brain that creates a sort of a nursia IT, creates a propensity for action across our entire body. So now that you understand that listening to music activates a lots of different brain circuits, of course, the circuits that respond to auditory stimuli, so we called primary auditory cortex, is powerfully activated by listening to music, but also circuits associated with novelty anticipation.

We talked about circuits in the brain, so with memory, but also circuits in the brain that associate with generating movement. And not just movement that is in sink with, or corresponds to the music that we're listening to, but all forms of movement. But when we listening to music that has a relatively fast cats, and we can actually to find what that caden's needs to be, and we'll do that in a moment when we do that so called promoter circuitry, the circuitry that's going to initiate that kind of inertia, or that pressure for movement within the neural circuits that actually evoke movement are all activated.

So for those of you that like to listen to music while you exercise, you're familiar with the fact that listening to great songs with great beat, with particular lye rics, or that associate you with a particular time or place in your life can be very motivating. But their data showing that when people listen to music that's faster than about a hundred hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty beats per minute, that IT creates a heighten state of motivation in the body to move. And the way that IT does that is by way of shifting the baLance between those go circuits and no go circuits of the basement.

Gangly are there are some other ways that IT does IT as well. For instance, music can vote. The release of certain neurochemicals called the catch cold means these include doping, but also no up and f and epinephrine from centres in the brain and body glens in the body, like the adjunct gLance that shift the body told a previous position of being more likely to move.

So we wanted distil all this out to a simple action, will take away, simply know this. Listening to music relatively faster. Music pretty disposes you to be more motivated to move and that is independent is what I find so cool. It's independent when they know you're familiar with the song, independent of whether or not the lyrics of the song are motivating lyrics. If they are, that's just going to layer on top of the faster caddies, which is going to predispose you to move.

But what's remarkable that just listening to that faster caden's music is creating a neuronal resonance, if you will, a pattern of neuronal firing within you that is going to essentially take your um and here i'm using metaphor is going to put your state of motivation from either back on your heels to being flat footed or let's say your mildly motivated or call that flat voted to being forward center of mass. So for any of you that are suffering from lack of motivation, in particular to exercise, but believe or not, also to do cognitive work, where you're going to be still and you're going to sit down, you're going to read or learn or practice something, listening to music for ten to fifteen minutes prior to doing that work, prior to doing that exercise, is one of the best ways to get motivated in order to engage in that worker, engage in that exercise. That's been demonstrated in the data very conclusively, using a variety of different types of music.

And again, there are multiple mechanisms that converge to create that heightened state of motivation. Some of those mechanisms are neurochemical, like the release of the soco, cata, coomin, dopamine and african an american. Some of them are strictly neural circuit.

They so activation of promoter circuitry. And those are going to combine with neural circuits that are going to narrow your field division. This is a good thing.

When ever you want to be motivated, they're going literally construct your field division to more of a tunnel type of vision is opposed to more panoramic vision. And that I described IT as placing you into a forward center of mass. I don't necessarily mean literally a forward center of mass and that perhaps you're exercise like running leaning slightly forward.

What i'm talking about is using music as a way to deliberately shift your state of mining body from one that is a motivated not motivated to more motivated. And it's a very simple protocol extracted from the peer review. Larger, you simply find some faster music, hopefully music that you like.

You would be even Better if I was music had lyrics that you find motivating and listening to that for ten to fifteen minutes prior to engaging in whatever that work may be, physical or cognitive. On the topic of cognitive work, one of the most common questions I get is what sorts of sounds or music should I listen to in order to increase my state of productivity? Motivation, concentration eta.

On previous podcast related to focus on motivation, I touched on the use of so called by oral beats which are different frequencies of beats presented to one or the other year is best accomplish with headphones and there are lot of different frequencies of by oral beat that you can get out there. Um you want to get detailed about this by robat also uh involve the differential between the frequency of beats between the two IT presented to the two years and then that difference then is heard by higher processing centers in the brain. In any event, we don't have to get too technical about IT.

We can simply say that, yes, there are some decent peer reviewed studies demonstrating that when people listen to so called forty hurts, particular frequency of sound, forty hurts by noral beats, that IT can enhance concentration and focus. However, this is important. There are some recent studies that show that bin oral beat sometimes can impede concentration and focus, and thereby can impede cognitive performance on various tasks.

However, the studies that show that by your beats can be detrimental to performance on various coding of task did not use forty hurts by arrows at specifically. So we are still awaiting more studies on by neural beats. Meanwhile, i'll just restate what I said before is that there is some evidence that listening to forty hurts by beat can enhance concentration and focus.

There are also data showing that other frequencies of boral beats might be detrimental to concentration and cognitive performance. And previously, i've also discuss studies showing that, for instance, of people listen to White noise in the background. You could do this on your computer or speakers in the romer headphones, or so called Brown noise, which is essentially like White noise of frequencies of sound or most frequency sound combined, but with particular frequencies of sounds that are essentially, and others are not ched doubt as it's called so called Brown noise.

Rather than understand all of this at the technical level, could have covered that before in previous podcast surface to say, if you go to youtube and you just put in White noise background for cognitive focus or Brown noise background for cognitive focus, you can just try those, if you like, during a session in which you're trying to read or learn or do mathematics or music, any kind of cognitive work. If you don't like them, if they don't work for you, then you there's certainly obligation to use them. Likewise, with forty hurts by no al beats and for dinner beat, you can also find those as zero cost youtube scripts that a number of zero cost apps that will allow you to listen to by neural beats.

I've used the APP brain wave for some period of time now to be, as i've never done this strict control experiment on myself, of listening to the forty hurts by neural beats. We're not listening to forty hurts by nal beats doing the equivalent types of tasks. I can be fairly regimented with my working behavior, but I haven't run a detailed control study on myself around this.

Rather, if I want to hide my level of focus or rule out distractions, what I will do is I will listen to either White noise or Brown noise while I do work. Or I will listen to forty hurt by naral beat. Well, I do certain types of work, or sometimes, Frankly, I just work in silence. Other times, I will listen to classical music in the background of a big fan of listening to classical piano. I particular like glen gold, the box variations that are very pleasant to me.

But, and this is really important in researching this episode about music in the brain, what I discovered was in the controlled studies that have been Carried out as to whether or not people perform Better on cognitive tasks that require a lot of focus, especially learning tasks that compared silence in the background to purely instrumental music, in the background to music with lyrics, in the background, two one's favorite music, with or without lyrics. The data are very clear. It's very clear that most people, that means, statistically, on average people perform best on cognitive task or a task that require a lot of focus to perform.

Again, these are mental tasks, not physical tasks, when they are doing those tasks in complete silence. So that was somewhat surprising to me. Second best conditions are to do those task in the presence of instrumental music only.

And in that case, there was a lot of variation as to whether not people referred faster caden's music. So one hundred and forty, two hundred and fifty beats per minute or faster or slower music, sixty beats per minute or slower. I'll get back to those specific numbers later because they represent threshold for inducing different types of emotional states are are happy or sad.

But meanwhile, it's very clear when people work in silence, they perform Better than when they work with music instrumentals in the background, and they perform even less well when they listened to music with lyrics in the background. I'll talk about why that is the case in a moment. And then people perform especially poorly relative to their performance in silence or any of the other conditions I mention when they listen to their favorite music while doing cognitive work.

And that, to me, was a bit surprising, especially since I spent a lot of my university years studying while listening to my favorite music in different forms that listen to slower music than faster music, can go back and forth and then sometimes turned IT off altogether and work in silence. But the center of mass of the literature around this issue of whether not to listen to music while one studies or tries to learn something, the data are pretty clear. The data show that is best to study and learn, either in silence or with quiet instrumentals in the background.

Now I mention before that previous studies compared the effects of working in silence of versus working with forty hurts by oral beat or White noise or Brown noise in the background. And in those studies, IT was found that the White noise, Brown noise and forty hurts by neural beats background produced Better levels of focus, I should say, heighten levels of focus and cognitive performance and learning then working in silence. But i've not yet seen a study that compared forty hurts by neural beats, Brown noise, White noise to music directly.

Perhaps there is one out there. If there is, please send IT to me. I'd be very curious to learn what the results of those are. Now that might seem like a lot of information, but the takeaway from IT are very clear.

It's always nice when things are clear, right? It's clear that if we want to focus and learn that working in silence or with White noise or Brown noise or forty hurts by arrow beat is going to be preferable to work while listening to music. But if you're going to listen to music while you work, that is, do cognitive work, then you're going to want to listen to music that is purely instrumental.

And ideally the music would be somewhat faster than one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty beats per minute. Now I do not expect you to go and measure the frequency of beats per minute in the music that you listen to. And of course, the beats permanent are going to change, right? That's an average one hundred and forty, two hundred and fifty beats per minute.

I don't expect you to get super technical breakdown. The music that you're listening to that is not my goal, nor is that really what this podcasts is about. I think occasionally people think that the the goal of a science and science space protocols podcasts, I is the optimize everything.

In fact, I not such a thing of the word optimize, because optimal really depends on the situation happened to be in the point here is simply this, that many people out there, including myself, have been listening to some of our favorite music while working. But it's very clear as to why that degrades ordinary performance. We know, for instance, that when we read, we are creating a semantic narrative in our own head.

And when we listen to music with lyrics, especially music with lyrics that we recognize the semantic content of the song, the lyrics competes with our comprehensive of the narrative within our head from the material that we're supposed to be learning. So now we should be sort of obvious why listening to your favorite music that includes lyrics while trying to learn something else is going to impede learning. It's because you ve got multiple scripts, multiple dialogues happening in your head.

And in fact, this is an opportunity for me to take a slight tangent, but a relevant one, which is to say, a lot of times people ask me know how I can retain a lot of information. I confess I never use a teleprompter for podcasting. I do have a usually a short stack of notes, you know, anywhere from one to, you know, six or seven pages of just bullet pointed notes that queue up things that I want to talk about and that I have researched in the lurch.

And then, of course, i've referred to papers from time to time. But one of the things that's been very useful for me, which was talk to me, by the way, by professor, when I was in university, to read and retain information that i've read by memory, is that when I read, i'm trying to listen to the words being spoken in my head. Typically my own voice, although sometimes in someone else's voice, doesn't really matter, I find.

So when i'm reading, yes, it's the process of visual scanning, but i'm also listening to the words within my head as if they're being spoken. Some of you may be familiar with this because you do IT others. If you perhaps I find this a bit more for ren. I'd be curious to know what your process of reading, retaining that information is, whether not includes an internal dialogue.

But none's IT should be very straight forward now to see why if you're listening to words that you're reading on a page, maybe even mumbling them, you a little bit moving your lips a little bit while you read, which, by the way, if you heard our episode on language in auditory processing with doctor chain, whose chabal surgery you csf, he talked about the fact when we read any material that the brain is generating promoter activity. You know what promoter activity is, promoter activity down to the muscles of the throat. Larry, since Frank, which would speak those words, were those signals to get above a certain level, but that when we read, typically the signals that are getting sent through those promoter circuits are just below the thread hold of what would have us actually speak those words.

Put simply, when we read, we are just shy of saying what we are reading. And so when I say that when I read, i'm listening to the words in my head. That's what i'm referring to.

So we're starting to fund in on some general principles of music and how to impacts the brain and how that can be leverage toward Better learning and Better motivation, both in the context of physical and cognitive endeavors. okay. So if you want to get motivated, listening to music prior to doing something that you're trying to motivate to do is a good idea.

That's what the data say. If you're trying to learn something that's cognitive that requires reading, focus and concentration, silence, forty hurts by neural beats, White noise or Brown noise is probably best. And if you are going to listen to music, listening to music that includes instrumentals but not lyrics would be best, and listening to music that includes lyric that you're very familiar with would be the worst condition.

Now with that said, there are nice studies. And by the way, i'm going to link to a number of reviews and primary studies in the shown captions that refer back to this point about to tell you, which is that listening to music while trying to do cognitive task can be detrimental toward learning that material. Turns out that if you listen to music in the brakes between trying to learn certain material, you can actually hide your level of cognition and focus on your ability to learn.

So I find this particularly cool. It's not that music is bad for focus on cognition and learning. It's that listening to music, especially music that you're familiar with, that includes lyrics at the same time, is trying to learn something else, is not a good idea.

But listening to music with lyrics, especially music with lyrical, that you're familiar with, that you find particularly uplifting and motivating, is a cognitive and performance enhance? Or when you go back to doing that work in silence, or perhaps while listening to White noise, Brown noise, or forty hurts by narrow beats. So like so many things, the answer is not black and White.

It's not that silence is Better than music or that music is bad for learning. IT turns out that listening to music, even music will lead to, are very familiar with, can be highly beneficial for learning, but that you want to listen to that music in the brakes between these bouts of cognitive work. Now i've done previous podcast that talk about how long about a cogniac work can or should be typically ninety minutes is going to be the upper limit before you take a break.

Some people can work for ninety minutes without a break. By the way, folks, when I say without a break, I don't mean remaining in a deep trench focus for nine minutes. Nobody does that.

Actually, I believe there are a few folks that with noral chemical assistance um or just by way of training can get themselves into a deep, deep trench of focus for a nine minutes or more. But most people are going to focus on something and then have their attention flit out of focus, and then they're going to have to draw focus back to whatever is they're doing. That's not just typical. That's absolutely Normal.

And you shouldn't be concerned all if you try and focus for three minutes and find your attention jumping around two or three times string that attempt but if you're somebody who is going to do to say a ninety minute or even sixty minute or or even thirty minute about of work and you are going to get up for a moment and use the restaurant or you're going to take a break in between belts of work, so maybe work for thirty minutes, take ten minutes or five minutes off, or nine minutes, take thirty minutes off. Listening to music in those breaks, IT seems, can increase our ability to focus into learn new material once we return to those belts of cognitive focus. Now, when IT comes to physical exertion, cardiff asked lar exercise resistance training of any kind.

Many people, including myself, like to listen to music while performing that physical exercise or that physical exertion. The data, whether not music, improve physical performance, is a bit mixed. Certainly, you can find studies that show that IT improves physical output.

Other studies will say that IT doesn't make a difference. Other study will say that IT reduces physical output. However, this is a very important.

However, the type of physical exercise is not very well match between those different studies. So this is something that I believe is going to be highly individual in accordance with the published data. I mix IT up. There are times, or I will head out for a run, or I will do a resistance training session, and I will listen to music, usually an album all the way through, or a playlist all the way through. That's because I don't want to be going on to my phone very often.

In fact, these days, I use an older, separate phone that doesn't have any text messaging or communication to the outside world, but IT has music loaded into IT or on to IT that allows me to just listen to music so that I don't run the risk beginning distracted texting in doing things like that. I just want to focus on my physical exercise. I should say that phone also has audio books, podcast, things that I ve downloaded to IT.

So it's a place where I can listen to things, but not communicate with the outside world, at least. Well, exercising. Some people do very well to listen to music, literally in between and during their sets of resistance training throughout their entire runs. It's going to be individual. You have to figure out what's best for you.

However, one of the most interesting things about the scientific literary on this shows that if people listen to music, in particular music, that tends to be faster, more upbeat, typically going to be, in these studies, rock and roll music, I supposed to classical, although there are some studies that have explored classical other forms of music as a related exercise, listening to that music in between bouts of exertion. So in the rest between sets of resistance training or periodical during, say, a run or about of cycling, can indeed enhances performance in a way that, at least by my read of the data, exceeds that which is observed when people just listen to music throughout. In other words, if you find IT useful to listen music before daring and after your workout, great be my guests.

However, what the data say is that switching up between silence and listening to music, and in this case, I would be listening to music that you're very familiar with them, that can evoke a sense of motivation and desired action in you, for whatever reason, the music, the beat, the memories that he draws you to at sea. Well, then that's going to be useful. So the realism, one protocol for how to get the most out of music for sake of physical exertion.

But if you're interested in playing with some of these variables as they're been examined within the p reviews literature, I find IT interesting in, indeed, I found a useful to, for instance, do to work out where I only listen to music in between sets of resistance training, or to listen to music prior to going out for a run. And then often times when I do that, the song or songs will be sort of on loop in my head. Although I confess a lot of times nowadays, I listen to podcast while I run or while I hike and when i'm in the gym and i'm doing resistance training, I like to listen to music I supposed to content.

That requires that I really focus very heavily on that content, such as a podcast, such as a book. Now i'd like to talk about the use of music to shift our mood and indeed, to get us out of states of anxiety. This is a really interesting scientific literature with some very specific action takeaway that I think everyone will find beneficial.

I certainly did. However, I want to point out that we don't need a scientific study to illustrate for us the way that music can shift our mood. And you already know why IT is that listening to a sad song and sometimes make us feel sad, listening to happy music can make us feel happy.

It's because when we listen to music, there are some fundamental components of that music, literally the mathematical structure of that music, including the frequency of sounds, the clients of those sounds, as well as the lyrics. But even in the absence of lyrics that are activating brain circuits within us, such that the frequencies of sound that we're hearing are evoking firing of neurons in the brain of the same frequency. Other words, your brain becomes a bit of a piano playing the same song that you're hearing inside your head, that sort of a duck, right? Hear music in your head, even if you're listened to IT from outside in the room.

But when you understand that neuron speak the language of electric chemical communication, what we're talking about here is particular music evoking the release of neurochemicals in your brain at a particular frequency. So just think about that for a second. We know that neo chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin, some of those so called in doggy ous opioid, right? These aren't oppos that people take.

This doesn't relate to the opposite crisis. Talking about india, genus opposites that are released in response to music, things like exercise, different types of social interactions, those and other chemicals are released according to the firing of specific neurons. And we know that when you listen to music at particular frequencies arranged in particular motifs at sara, that the neurons that released those neurochemicals are firing at those same frequencies, in other words, that the sound is causing a sound dependent pharmacologic concert within your brain.

So that fact should make IT incredibly clear as to why certain music, even in the absence of lyrics, can evoke certain emotional states. Certain sound frequencies are transformed into the neural language within your brain that releases certain neurochemicals that create certain emotional states of brain and body. Just to drill in how incredible that really is a little bit further, if you see a beautiful painting or the picture, or presence of somebody's face in real life, that evokes a particularly strong, positive or negative emotion, you can imagine that, of course, IT creates the release of certain other chemicals.

Or perhaps in the case of a negative hint, face suppresses the release of certain neo chemicals. But we can't say with that, a particular frequency of color, say, reds against oranges or the presence of a rainbow, evokes a sort of rainbow light cascade of neurochemicals, where, as with sound, that's exactly what's happening. And this isn't diminish the value of vision in terms of its ability to evoke emotional states within us, after all, foremost a neuroscientist.

But under the umbrella neuroscientist, I started off as, and I continue to be a vision, or scientists, studying the visual system in its ability to evoke motion states within us. But I have to acknowledge that the auditory system, and in particular the circuits in the brain that respond to music, have a remarkably potentate let to evoke these emotional states, which is why, when surveys have been done asking people why they listen to music, the responses that have come back generally resemble the following statistics. Approximately ninety percent of people say they listen to music to relax.

Approximately eighty two percent of people self report that they listen to music in order to make themselves happy. Approximately in forty six point five percent of people say that they listen to music in order to process particular states of emotion will get back to what process means in a moment, but more often than not, when the studies have a specific questions about what particular types of emotions people are listening to in order to process the emotions Better IT is the emotion of sadness. And thirty two point five percent of people report that they listened to music in order to increase their sense of concentration.

And we already talked about the role of music in concentration or stability, in some cases, to inhibit concentration a few minutes ago. Now you might be asking yourself, how can ninety percent of people listen music for one thing and eighty two percent of people for another thing, and so on? And so four were well over a hundred percent people well in this survey.

And other survey is like IT people at the option give multiple reasons for listening to music because, of course, most people have multiple reasons for listen to music. Now with that said, if we are to examine this one particular category, nearly half of people who report listening to music on a regular basis listen to music in order to process their emotions. We can ask, what does the scientific literary tell us about how certain types of music evoke certain types of emotions, or help us process certain emotions? And we will get back to what we mean by process is in a moment.

But a number of studies have been done on this. There's some many analysis that can verge on some general themes. What I refer to as the center of mass of data, right? When there are a lot of studies in the given area, the outcomes of some of those studies conflict with one another, generally in a good men.

To analyze what happens is different studies are considered more powerful or less powerful than others, depending on subjects were involved, that different control conditions are lack of control conditions and so on. And so for this is one of the great values of meta analysis as that they don't treat all studies equally. They separate out studies based on their level of rigor and theron's. Well, what we can say with confidence is that music that makes us couldn't code happy, or tends to shift people's ate from less happy to happier, regardless of how they entered the experiment, tend to be faster music, meaning music that on average contains hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty beats per minute or faster OK. And there are some other features to and happy music, if you will, that IT tends to be in a major key that if there are lyrics to that music, that the lyrics tend to report things that are happy or get this total nonsense.

In fact, when the type of lyrics in this kind of happy music, like singing about um great events in life and positive things, falling in love, being in love, positive memories, birth of children, connection to friends, great adventures, those lyrics where I should say that music containing those lyrics was no more effective in creating states of happiness then was music of equivalent cats. So again, music that was one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty minutes per minute or faster on average. Well, even if the leaders were complete nonsense, even if the vocalizations weren't actual words, IT still evoke the same increase in the level of happiness in the subject.

Then, when compared to the music containing coherent lyrics around happy events, what this means is that the cadence of music is no doubt the critical variable. When one is trying to shift one's mood from a state of whatever could be depressed or sad to non depressed, non ad or neutral to positive, and so on and so forth. But what this also explains is one hit wonders.

Rarely, if ever, by the way, are one hit wonders. Sad and depressing songs, sometimes, almost always this one hit wonders, are songs that are very effective in shifting people's mood from not so happy to happier. And we could just say happier regardless where they started out. Before listening this song, they feel Better well. And after listening to the song, and indeed, more often than not, the lyrical content of those songs is not particularly meaningful.

It's not addressing a particularly meaningful state or issue is just what some people call a party song or it's something that's just uplifting, not just to them, but to many other people, which actually brings up an interesting and future looking point, which is that nowadays we are seeing the emergence of A I artificial intelligence being used to generate new songs by capturing these well established rules cleaned from neuroscience of how music impacts the brain, such that in the future, artificial intelligence is going to be generating hit songs for us as supposed to having people generating hit songs I know this evokes uh state of concern and fear uh in many people I think that um this is uh fear that needs to be matched with um I don't know, perhaps a uh cautious optimism who knows maybe there are patterns of music, including lyrics, that human beings in their current understanding of themselves and of music have not yet been able to tap into. And you know maybe A I will be generating the best music that we've ever heard or perhaps music that can shift our states from more depressed or sad to heighten levels of happiness in ways that humans have just not been able to accomplish. So I think it's important to baLance any pessimism about A I and its ability to generate music based on these rules of how music impacts the brain with an open, mindless ss, after all, neuroscience, neuroimaging and neural recordings directly with electrodes in the brain.

Well, people are listening to music, is teaching us how the brain responds to that music, and is giving us information that indeed human beings, but also computers, can use in order to generate stimulating sic that can shift our brain into more positive states. And if that's the case, wouldn't that be wonderful? Another established feature of happy music is get this, its ability to get people to relax the thorough of their brow, indeed, to raise their eyebrows and to be a bit wide, died.

And not just through automation ic, but rather through activation of the muscles in the face. Converse sly, we know that sad music, and here we can define sad music. This has actually been done in the literature.

Sad music tends to be slower than average, slower than sixty beats per minute or so, again on average. And this, again, is independent of the lyrics that might not even be present in the song. Sad music tends to activate the corrugating or muscles of the forehead, which are the muscles that furrow the brow and that lead to a kind of serious look.

It's a folding in of the face, as opposed to a widening up of the eyes and a relaxation of the brow. Now, given where we are in the course of this discussion, that shouldn't be surprising. We already talked about how listen to particular sounds evokes the release of particular neurochemicals.

But in a more direct fashion, listening to particular sounds activates certain promoter motor circuits within the brain body, not just the desired move once torso, limbs or both bob one's head, or move a head side aside, but also the microstructures of the face, which, because one of the main roles of the face is to communicate emotion, is going to cause either a relaxation of the Brown and in a lifting of the eyebrows, or a ferroll ing or activation of the corrugating or muscles of the eyebrow. And if that's not obvious and yet interesting enough, well, get this. There seems to be a direct relationship.

I'm chuckling because this still just blows my mind because it's a total 的 obvious when you hear， but it's still just so cool that there's a direct relationship of the frequency of the Sally here, either low pitched or high pitched, and the cadences of that sound. And here I realized i'm not using technical music theory, language, but whether not that particular tone is played over and over closing time or more space out in time, in facial expressions. And indeed, when we listen to base tones, low frequency tones set apart from one another with some distance so that they're not overlapping, we get the all too familiar base face.

So what i'm referring to hear is what neuroscientists would call a labeled line, literally a circuit of neurons that goes from the periphery, in this case, hour ears, into our brain, through several different stations, and then weeks out to impact all sorts of things within a state of emotion, state of motivation, our propensity to move. But also a labeled line circuit coming from hearing low frequency sounds played space apart from one another that evokes a particular facial expression. And again, this takes us back to the earlier statement that I made, which is not an original statement.

Frankly, there are people within the field of auditory processing and understanding how the brain processes music. In fact, one of the world experts in this, doctor jarvis, that the rockefeller university, was a guest on this podcast where we talked about the relationship between music movement and singing, and the fact that music movement, in particularly dance and singing, likely preceded the evolution of modern spoken language. Well, air, java and others have argued, quite convincing, that these circuits that are calling labeled lines to particular facial expressions and states of emotion are the most fundamental components of communication and the ways that humans have communicated about their emotional state and literally induce that same emotional state in other members of our species, dating back tens of thousands, if not more years.

One of the fun things about researching this episode on music in the brain is that there are a lot of quality studies expLoring how music impacts the brain. Neural imaging, neural recording data from excEllent laboratories as well as a lot of studies. In fact, a surprising number of studies expLoring how particular types of music impacts mood states.

Unfortunately, that allowed me to clean some very specific recommendations as to the minimum amount of, say, happy music that you need to listen to in order to shift your mood into a happier state. And indeed, the numbers exist in the literal. And IT has been shown that the threshold for significantly shifting one's mood into a happier state by listening to the sort of music we talked about before, that faster caden's music, even with nonsense lyrics, I could include other lyrics instead, is nine minutes, not ten, not eight, but nine.

And i'm sort of joking when I say, not ten, not eight, but nine. Because, of course, you could listen to music for ten minutes or fifteen minutes or a longer and tractor, we talked about the benefits of doing that. But when one examines the various studies that looked at how long subjects need to listen to music, in order shift their mood into happier state, the threshold seems to be nine minutes.

So if you want to feel happier than you currently feel, IT seems that listening to happy music for nine minutes or more is going to be the effective approach. okay? So nine minutes or more to shift one state to happier.

What about to process suber or sad feelings, feelings of loss? Well, this raises an even bigger question, and it's a question that I also get very often. You are nose. I get a lot of questions often. In any event, one of the common questions that I get is when we are feeling sad or experiencing a loss of grieving, the loss of a relationship by by deaths decision, or by somebody moving away, or the loss of a pet, IT said, is IT Better to go into that state, in other words, to fel one's feelings or to counter those feelings? Now historically, that's been a very difficult question for me to answer because who remind to say whether not you should feel your feelings or whether not feeling those feelings will take you down a trench of feeling much worse or much Better?

In fact, there's an emerging literature exactly about that issue, that is, whether not the caffari model is really best of aris being the expression and feeling of one's emotions as a way to excluder get rid of those emotions, or whether not that simply drives us further down the trench of those emotions. That's really something that we should address in a separate podcast episode, and I will have experts from the fields of psychiatry and psychology to help us address that question directly. But since we're talking about music in the brain and the fact that music has a tremendous capacity to evoke emotional states, including sad states, what has been shown in the pure reviewed literature is that when people who are feeling sad, for whatever reason, loss of relationship, death, who knows, doesn't really matter why they are feelings at.

After all, it's that they are feeling sad, listening to thirteen minutes or more of sad music, that music can contain lyrical they are familiar with or no lyrics, regardless of whether that contains lyrics. It's going to be on average fifty or sixty beats per minute or less. We establish that already listening to that for thirteen minutes or more has been shown to be effective in allowing people to quote, quote, process their sober feelings, and to some extent, to move past their feelings of sadness.

So those studies support the idea that when feeling sad, feeling one's feelings, and perhaps even amplifying those feelings of sadness by listening to sad music for thirteen minutes or more, can help people process those sad feelings. And while that point might seem overly reductionist, I actually think it's a real value. I am certainly familiar with feelings of loss.

Feelings of grief. And i've often struggled with this question of, you know, cash. Do I try and just push you aside? Or do I deal with those feelings again? This is something that you really need to determine for yourself. But what these study show pretty conclusively is that when we're feeling sad, matching that sadness, or ample fine, that sadness by listening to sad music for thirteen minutes or more, can help us move through that state of sadness.

And one could argue this is more less the use of cathartic, of amplifying emotional expression or feeling in order to try to move that feeling out is a classic idea of originating in audience psychology, but probably before then as well. But in any event, I think these data support the idea that even when feeling sad, perhaps especially when feeling sad, amplifying or matching those feelings through the use of sad music for thirteen minutes or more, again, you don't need to set a time or for thirteen minutes. But giving yourself a period of time to just listen to that music is one way that can help move through that state of sadness and then be able to lean back into other areas of life.

So we talked about the role of music in evoking or shifting states of happiness and sadness. There are also interesting data that support the use of music for shifting one out of a state of heightened anxiety. And I find this especially interesting because my laboratory for a long time has worked on behavioral interventions to reduce anxiety.

Things like the philological sigh, which, if you're not familiar with, you can put your sio logical sigh in my last name, and the youtube. And there's a demonstration of that. It's a breathing technique of two in halls through the nose and along excel through the mouth to longs empty that at this point time, we understand to be the fastest and most effective way to reduce one levels of anxiety in real time.

So it's two inhales with the nose long to lungs empty x hail through the mouth. That's the physiological sigh. Earlier, we talked about the fact that one of the main ways in which listening to music shifts heart rate and increases hard rate variability, and thereby positively shifts a number of different health metrics, is through shifts in breathing.

So I justify that brief in yet about the physical ological side, as within the general context of what we're talking about today. In any event, there are data that have explored whether not specific musical stimulus can be used to significantly reduce anxiety, in particular one published out of the university of pensylvania. And I will provide a link to the study in the showroom, te captions, which shows that people that listen to a particular song that i'll describe in a moment experiences up to sixty five percent reductions in their anxiety.

That's a significant reduction in an anxiety. And I should point out that sixty five percent reduction in the anxiety in this case was accomplished with just three minutes of listening to this one particular song and get this that particular song was as effective in reducing anxiety as one of the most commonly prescribed benzo. Diaz paints.

S, so what is this magical anxiety? Cy song, the title of the song is waited less by marconi union. I hadn't heard of the song prior to researching this episode.

I did indeed look up the song on youtube and listen to the song. I will provide a link to the song in the shown of captions. I confess that IT is a very relaxing song.

I also confess that I was not experiencing anxiety when I listened to the song, but IT was successful in reducing my level of overall automation ic rosel. I found myself more relaxed at that. And now, of course, what i'm describing in terms of my own experience is not a peer reviews study is what I would call antic data, meaning i'm just describing experience.

But again, there are p reviews studies expLoring how this particular song shifts once automating ic state. And I think this three minutes of listening to this one song should at least be tried by anyone that's trying to reduce their anxiety. Because unless you're listening the song in some way that i'm not aware of, like excessively loud or something that I can't imagine how listening to the song would be detrimental in any way.

And if you are anything like the subjects in the study that they explored, IT could very well be beneficial and help you reduce your anxiety. It's also something that you could keep cute up in your phone or on any device such that if you think you may experience anxious, you just put your headphones in and listen to IT. You might be wondering whether not marconi union, wait less is only three minutes long.

Well, I don't know the answer to that, because when you go on youtube, what you'll see is that clearly a number of people are benefiting from listening to the song to reduce their anxiety, or at least that a number of people have listen to the song. Because if you put ony union waight less into the search function on youtube, what you're quickly discover is that the top video has get this forty seven million views. And it's ten hours long now across today's episode, it's spin in the back of my mind that some of you out there perhaps are training musicians that you grew up playing an instrument, perhaps saying, inquire at school.

Perhaps you played multiple instruments. Perhaps you even know music theory. We're as others such as myself, we're encouraged to plan instrument when we were Younger, but then abandoned that instrument.

In fact, we'll just tell you a brief story. When I was a kid, every kid in school was required to pick an instrument. My parents, for whatever reason, clearly they didn't to ask me what I wanted do.

They asked me to play the violin in the school, and I got the violin. I started playing the violin. I took the suzuki method lessons. This is where you don't learn to read music directly.

Um you there is a number uh assignment to the different notes and that initially how you learn, I was also supposed to listen to the songs while I slept. This idea that some of the music and musical learning could be encoded during sleep um an interesting topic because there's actually some emerging evidence for that now. But at the time, as far as I know, there were no peer reviews, studies but nonetheless was I thought that this works and perhaps IT does. Well, I can tell you one thing for sure, he did not work for me because I have one photo, and truly just one from a concert that I played. I must have been about eight or nine years old.

And within this photo, what you'll notice is there is a gallery of children, all with violence, all whom bows are up and my boat is down, that in addition to the fact that my fly was open in the picture and the fact that every time I played the violin, either by practice or with the teacher present, when we would go to these once a week sessions with the individual teacher, people would kinge, animals would cringe, literally, dogs would hell, such that my parents did not encourage me to continue playing. In fact, they and many others encourage me to quit playing. So I quit playing.

I confess I don't know how to play any instrument. I've attempted a few other instruments in my lifetime. Yes, I believe in neuroplasticity ity. This is a hallmark feature of our brain. Our brain can learn things even as adults.

But the point of tried to make here is that I am not of the category of kids that played an instrument and understands music theory or how to read music. I simply don't. And I realized that those of you that are listening to this are watching this out. There are probably in a mixed category of proficiency, all the way down to what I would consider my own, a relationship to music, which is deficiency.

Although I greatly enjoy listening to music and I do have a pretty good ability to memorize lyrics, in any event, the reason I raised this is that there are now dozens, if not hundreds, of quality per reviewed studies using a variety of technical approaches that show that when children, especially children Younger than eight, learn to play an instrument and even Better learn to play multiple instruments, regardless of whether not they learn to read music, that IT leads to greatly enhanced connectivity within the brain that persists into adult od. And that IT facilitate other forms of neuroplasticity and learning, which is basically to say that my brain very likely does not include these enhances circuits. Which circuits are I referring to? Well, there a number of different circuits in the brain that have been shown to expand when children learn how to play instrument as a child, eight or Younger.

And again, eight isn't a strict cut off. And I always have to highlight this for give attention. But when we say eight or Younger, I don't want people with nine year old children or ten year old kid or even sixteen year old kid listening, or even adult listening to think, oh, you know, the window is shut for me because when one designs of study, you have to have some threshold who you include and who you don't include.

And some sometimes that leads to these kind of artificial perceptions about where the cut offs are. In any event, it's very clear that if you did learn an instrument when you were Young, or ideally, even multiple instruments. And even Better would be to learn multiple instruments and how to sing along with instrumentals, especially in an improvised manner. Well, your brain has expanded connectivity, on average, relative to children that did not have that experience.

Now the good news is that learning how to play instrument, or even, thankfully for me, listening to novel forms of music, music that you don't typically listen to for thirty to sixty minutes per day, and IT doesn't have to be every day, in fact, can even be just three days a week for thirty to sixty minutes, has been shown to expand brain connectivity in ways that, of course, lends itself to Better musical comprehension and even performance about learning how to play a musical instrument at any age, as well as singing. And singing, especially with others in a group, has been shown to enhance learning. And the acquisition of new skills separate from musical learning and singing.

In other words, that seems that learning how to play an instrument and singing are a gateway to neuroplasticity. And this is again supported by neural imaging data. Um some of the more striking of those data are that you know children that learnt how to play one to three instruments when they were a kid, or that saying in acquire or a group or that we're taught to sing solo for that matter, show up to thirty percent greater connectivity within this particular brain network that links the two hemispheres of the brain.

Now as soon as I say two hemispheres of the brain, IT starts drawing up a lot of ideas in people's heads, mainly derived from pop sycom gy, that, you know, there are left brain people and right brain people. I've touched on this before, but I want to make this abandoned tly clear again now. Most of what you've heard about so called left brained people and right brained people is complete and total nonsense.

It's myth. There are some functions in the brain that are lateralization to the left of the right hemisphere, in particular, proceed. They are lifting and falling of speech and in singing is highly literalities ed in the brain.

Other aspects of language can be lateralization in the brain. But really, if you hear that certain people are more emotional or certain people more logical based on right brain, left brain stuff, that's completely false. It's complete garbage. In fact, it's not based on any real solid data.

So when I say that learning an instrument or learning how to say Young or even as an adult, is beneficial for increasing the connectivity between the two sides of the brain, what that increased connectivity between the two sides of the brain, which is, by the way, media, through a structure called the corps callosum, is not about enhancing one's emotional capacity or logical capacity, is really about increasing the capacity of all brain circuits, or at least the brain circuits that are connected up directly with the corpus callosum, which includes many brain circuits for things like cognition, language, learning, speech, mathematics. Lot of people don't realize this, but a lot of musicians are also especially adept mathematics. And for you musicians, you're truly nothing, of course, right, because music is grounded in theory that has basis in math and in physics, something that we will address in a future episode about harmonics ea.

When children or adults learn how to play a musical instrument or several, or how to sing and play musical instruments, that increased connectivity in the corpus callosum is essentially providing multiple highways of option for learning all sorts of things. So it's something that I highly encouraged, so much so that I intend to finally, finally learn how to play an instrument. I've got a particular instrument in mind that i've anted to learn how to play for a very long time. But based on my prior experience, we're trying to learn an instrument. And because I like to consider myself a consider a person, I intend to do this more, less in isolation from people, and indeed from animals as well.

And for those of you that don't have the time or energy or desire to learn new forms of music, you'll be perhaps delighted to know that just listening to novel forms of music, and in particularly, when you listen to novel forms of music and you pay attention to that music, not just letting IT playing in the background, that too has been demonstrated to expand the brain's capacity for neural plasticity, its ability to modify itself and make IT Better at learning other sorts of things, both cognitive and physical. So I highly encourage you to listen to the music you love. I certainly love to listen to the music that I delighted and have for so many years, but there is also a strong scientific support to encourage listening to new forms of music that hopefully you will like.

But none. There's the mere forging for. And listening to novel forms of music itself seems to activate brain circuitry in a way that allows for Better learning, a comprehensions of all sorts of things.

So today we've been talking about music in the brain, and I confess this is an enormous topic, so much so that I had to discard with entire sets of data and discussion around, for instance, the mathematical structure of music and how that relates to the mathematical structure of firing of neurons. We touched on this a little bit, however, in the context of certain frequencies of sounds that we hear, creating certain frequencies of neuronal firing and activation, in the just think about that. How amazing that is.

Literally like the brain playing your neurons like a piano. This is not what happens when you smell a particular older, or taste a particular taste, or see a particular face or visual stimulus. Incredible things happen within those senses as well.

But there is something also fundamental and incredible about music and its ability to tap into our neural circuitry, our neural chemistry, ways that shift our emotional states and our motivational states. So we talked about ways that music can be leverage to shift our emotional and motivational states. Again, not as a way to reduce music to its reductionist parts. We're rather to help us gain understanding in into how the brain responds to music and how we can leverage music of all kinds within without lyrics, how we can baLance the contrast between music and silence to increase motivation, and so on and so on.

For those of you, they are interested in the more formal structure of music and how IT relates to brain function and vice versa, as well as for those of you, they are interested in singing and song writing and more along the lines of lyrical content and how singing in groups and how improve sation of singing and musical plane can impact bring function and plasticity. I promise you there is going to be both an expert guest coming on the podcast to discuss that as well as a solo episode on those topics. Again, the topic of music in the brain being far too vast to cover in just one conversation.

With that said, I hope that today's discussion allowed for you to think about music differently. Hopefully, IT will lead you to listen to music a bit differently, perhaps even leverage music for different purposes in your life, and above all, to think about music and to enjoy music, either listening to IT or playing IT or both. Because, as you now know, music isn't just able to activate your brain, but rather, your brain contains the vast amounts of real estate that are literally there to listen to music.

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