Question: Is it true that the brain responds differently under the influence of certain music genres. I know that plants grow at different rates of speed in response to different types of music and it interests me highly to know whether music has the same influence on the brain.
Keywords: music
narwhalelite004
It may do!
Music is used as a therapy for many brain disorders to try and help people remember things or to calm them down.
Music can make you happy, sad, excited, all sorts of things. So I would imagine that different brain areas can be involved in these kind of effects.
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I don’t know exactly what the impact of different music genres on the brain is – there’s an interesting book called “This is your brain on music” which would probably explain it – I bought it ages ago but haven’t read much of it yet! 🙂
One thing is really interesting though about what our brain does when we listen to music – so in your brain you have neurons which fire in response to stimuli – like sound. When you’re listening to a piece of music, they fire away in response to it, but, when there is a pause in the music, for example in a pop song there might be a pause of 1 second before going into another chorus or something, your neurons get REALLY excited!
For some reason your brain gets really excited by this pause – more excited than when the music is playing continuously! This might be because it is anticipating the resumption of the song, but I am not entirely sure. It’s pretty interesting though! Think about that next time you listen to a song which has a slight pause/silence in the middle of it!
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Hmm.. maybe I should play my cells some music.. Oh wait, they don’t have ears.
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Not sure about the plants, but certainly there is a different brain response to different types of music. Music is often used, for example, to study emotion (e.g., by using happy music to induce happiness, sad music to induce sadness etc.), the experience of which is linked to a number of brain regions including the amygdala. It’s also interesting the way in which music can be linked to other memories, and can often “take us back” to a particular time and place. This might again be due to the influence of music on emotion, and the power of emotion on memory.
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