How music is like food for the brain
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Scientists are learning how music can do more than lift our mood, from easing anxiety to helping experimental drugs reach the brain.
Why it matters: Music could supplement therapy, help people manage pain and anxiety — and someday even boost treatments for brain disease.
State of play: Music has the power to stimulate the body's reward system, similar to the way that warmth, food and social connection do — and that's one of the most significant discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades, according to Daniel Bowling, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Stanford School of Medicine.
- That finding is "really important for mental health" because it means music can help activate brain regions and feel-good chemicals when someone is anxious or depressed, he says.
What we're hearing: Beyond the physical reaction of hearing music, the exercise of actively listening to music and songwriting could offer anxiety relief similar to cognitive behavioral therapy — at least that's what research music therapist Sean McNally has been seeing in an ongoing study of cancer survivors at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.
- In that study, cancer survivors get one-hour Zoom sessions with a music therapist like McNally. The sessions vary, but can include listening to music and discussing the emotions it evokes, then songwriting together based on how the patient is feeling.
- Music therapy is "not about distraction," but about "giving people agency over their emotion," McNally says. "When a patient hears their own story sung back to them, there's something that shifts." It's often a powerful moment of joy, and possibly tears, he says.
The latest: New music therapy apps are leveraging AI in curating scientifically informed playlists to help users feel more calm, focused or energetic.
Zoom in: App Spiritune has developed specific "sonic recipes" (that's an internal company term) with 20 or so specific acoustic guidelines to help users feel a certain way, says Bowling, the app's scientific co-founder and a musician.
- Producers make the songs and an AI model assesses the compositions for quality and the emotions they evoke.
- For example: Calming songs tend to be 60-80 bpms and have repeated patterns.
The intrigue: Although there are parameters that can help make for groovy tunes, musical taste is deeply personal — and often crystallizes in your teens and 20s. "We don't know why," Bowling says.
- But there are factors: That's typically the time that humans are often nostalgic for later in life, and when they were the most hormonal and spent the most time listening to music.
What's next: Music might make medicines more effective in reaching the brain.
- In a recent peer-reviewed study, mice that were injected with nanoparticle-based drugs and exposed to low-frequency sounds had more medicine reach their brains.
- "The capability of these particles to cross inside the brain is extremely low because the brain is the most protected organ," says Patricia Mora-Raimundo, a former post-doctoral research fellow at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, who led the study. So the fact that the music increased the uptake of medicine in the brain was "really surprising."
- Her hope is that exposing patients to different music patterns — like low-frequency sounds — could ultimately help treat neurodegenerative diseases.
