Listen while you work: What music does to your brain

Cited from : http://blog.pickcrew.com/the-magic-of-music-and-what-it-does-to-your-brain/

-----------------------------------------------

Listen while you work: What music does to your brain

POSTED BY MIKAEL CHO
Damn. I forgot my headphones.

Nothing has a more negative impact on my day than showing up to our office without them.

Like most people, music is a huge part of my life and my tastes are constantly changing based on how I feel or what I’m doing.

I listen to the most music while I work, sifting through playlists, from jazz, to indie pop, to electronica, on what seems to be a never-ending SEARCH for the perfect tunes to keep me in the zone.

When I looked back at all my favorite playlists, I wondered what effect music has had on my work and more specifically, which types of music have had the most impact.

I thought it’d be interesting to take a dive into the science behind the deep power of music to find out if it actually helps you work better.


Why you love music

Whether you’re listening to the driving beat of a Daft Punk song or the opening chords of a mellow Jack Johnson track, both have an effect on your brain that is not seen in any other animal.

When you listen to music, a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens ACTIVATES. This triggers the release of the ‘pleasure chemical’ dopamine, that lives in a group of neurons in your brain called the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA):


This pathway in the brain is called the Reward System and Dopamine is strongly associated with it.

Dopamine is the same chemical that gets released when you eat your favorite food or when you get a new follower on Twitter, causing you to want more, more, more.

This is why Dopamine is also responsible for the saying:

‘Two cheeseburgers equals one orgasm.’ – PBS
The amount of dopamine that gets released and the feelings of pleasure we get from it are also largely dependent on the element of surprise.

For instance, when you stumble upon a new song that you love, more dopamine is released and you get even more excited than if you were to listen to one of your favorite songs that you’ve heard multiple times.

Music was meant to keep you alive

From the perspective of evolution, there’s something deeper about why you feel pleasure when you listen to music.

Neuroscientist and musician, Jamshed Bharucha noted that creative domains, like music, allow humans to connect in a synchronized way, helping us develop a group identity and makes us more likely to work together – which was an immensely important advantage for keeping the human species alive.

This development of group identity through music was seen in a recent study of preschool children.

The study paired children together in sets of two and showed them toy frogs. The researchers said these toy frogs needed to be woken up by either a song or exercise.

Psychologists then split the children up into two groups of 24 sets of children.