Last updated April 29, 2024.
Edited and medically reviewed by Patrick Alban, DC. Written by Deane Alban.
Music improves brain health and function in many ways. It makes you smarter, happier, and more productive at any age. Listening is good, playing is better.
Music has played an important part in every human culture, both past and present.
People around the world universally respond to music.
And now, advances in neuroscience enable researchers to measure just how music affects the brain.
The interest in the effects of music on the brain has produced a new field of research called neuromusicology which explores how the nervous system reacts to music.
And the evidence is in — music activates every part of the brain.
Playing, or even just listening to, music can make you smarter, happier, healthier, and more productive at all stages of life.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the latest findings about how music can enhance the health and function of the brain.
Why Musicians Have Healthier Brains
For evidence of how music affects the brain, it makes sense to look at the brains of people who play a lot of music — professional musicians.
Brain scans show that their brains are different than those of non-musicians.
Musicians have bigger, better-connected, more sensitive brains.
Musicians have superior working memory, auditory skills, and mental flexibility.
Their brains are physically more symmetrical and respond more symmetrically when listening to music.
Areas of the brain responsible for motor control, auditory processing, and spatial coordination are larger.
Musicians also have a larger corpus callosum.
This is the band of nerve fibers that transfers information between the two hemispheres of the brain.
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This increase in size indicates that the two sides of musicians’ brains are better at communicating with each other.
While most of us aren’t professional musicians, we still listen to a lot of music — an average of 32 hours per week.
This is enough time for music to affect the brains of non-musicians as well.
How Music Improves Mood and Reduces Stress
Science has now proven what music lovers already know, that listening to upbeat music can improve your mood.
Listening to and playing music reduces chronic stress by lowering the stress hormone cortisol.
Music can make you feel more hopeful, powerful, and in control of your life.
By increasing endorphins, listening to music can help you cope with pain.
If you are going through a tough time, listening to music, especially sad music, can be cathartic.
It can help you get in touch with your emotions to help you heal.
Music Boosts Brain Chemicals
One of the ways music affects mood is by stimulating the formation of certain brain chemicals.
Listening to music increases the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine is the brain’s “motivation molecule” and an integral part of the pleasure-reward system.
It’s the same brain chemical responsible for the feel-good states brought on by eating chocolate, orgasm, and runner’s high.
When listening to a playlist, you can further increase dopamine by choosing the shuffle mode.
When one of your favorite songs unexpectedly comes up, it triggers an added dopamine boost.
Playing music with others or enjoying live music stimulates the brain hormone oxytocin.
Oxytocin has been called the “trust molecule” and the “moral molecule” since it helps us bond with and trust others.
There’s evidence that the oxytocin bump experienced by music lovers can make them more generous and trustworthy.
How Music Makes Us More Productive and Creative
There’s abundant evidence that listening to music while you work can make you happier and more productive.
This is especially true if you can choose your own music.
Office workers allowed to listen to their preferred choice of music complete tasks more quickly and come up with better ideas than those who have no control over their sound environment.
Background music enhances performance on cognitive tasks, improves accuracy, and enables the completion of repetitive tasks more efficiently.
" When children had as little as four years of music lessons, they experienced long-term cognitive benefits that researchers could detect 40 years later.
The effects of music on productivity have been studied in some very specific occupations.
Software developers were happier and produced better work more efficiently when listening to music.
When surgeons listened to music while operating, they were less stressed and worked faster and more accurately, especially if they were allowed to pick the music.
Music can help people perform better in high-pressure situations.
Listening to upbeat music before a game can keep athletes from choking under pressure.
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Music can be a source of creativity, especially when it’s upbeat.
When study participants listened to music labeled “happy,” their creativity increased.
They came up with more creative solutions and a greater number of ideas than those who listened to other kinds of music or no music at all.
Interestingly, participants didn’t have to like the music they were hearing to reap these benefits.
How Music Can Make You a Better Person
Music has the power to bring forth our better nature.
Some interesting studies have been done on what researchers refer to as prosocial behaviors.
These are voluntary behaviors intended to benefit others, such as empathy, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, and cooperation.
Listening to music makes people more inclined to spend time and energy helping others.
This is especially pronounced when music is appreciated in a group such as when people dance or play music with others, or attend a concert.
This prosocial effect of music has been observed in both children and adults.
Music has been found to make children as young as 14 months more helpful.
The most effective music has lyrics advocating kindness and helpfulness.
A classic example of a prosocial song is We Are the World which has been performed for many humanitarian purposes.
Listening to positive lyrics can affect how kind and generous you will be and even how you’ll spend your money.
Restaurant customers leave bigger tips when music with positive messages is played during their meal.
Prosocial lyrics can even encourage coffee shop customers to buy fair-trade coffee.
Positive song lyrics help make people less prejudiced and fearful of those different than them.
When men listen to music with pro-equality lyrics, it positively affects their attitudes and behavior towards women.
The Benefits of Music for Young Brains
In the 1990s, the effect of music on the brain was popularized as the Mozart effect.
This theory purported that listening to music composed by Mozart made kids smarter.
Parents exposed their babies to the music of Mozart to give their brains a jumpstart, often even before they were born.
The accepted theory now is that, while taking music lessons as a child enhances brain function and structure, there’s nothing uniquely beneficial about the music of Mozart.
Children with musical backgrounds do better in subjects like language, reading, and math and have better fine motor skills than their non-musical classmates.
Early music lessons encourage brain plasticity, the brain’s capacity to change and grow.
Just a half-hour music lesson increases blood flow in the left hemisphere of the brain.
And if kids don’t stick with their music lessons forever, that’s OK.
There’s evidence that when music training begins young, the brain enhancement that occurs can last a lifetime.
When children had as few as four years of music lessons, they experienced long-term cognitive benefits that researchers could detect 40 years later.
Kids who sing together in a choir report higher satisfaction in all their classes, not just music.
Most studies on music and the brain have been done on school-age kids and it looks like it’s never too young to start.
Music lessons of sorts — playing drums and singing nursery rhymes — were given to babies before they could walk or talk.
Babies who had music lessons communicated better and showed earlier and more sophisticated brain responses to music.
Music Makes Children Better Students
Many schools have cut music programs due to loss of funding.
This is widely believed by parents and educators to be a big mistake.
Music, whether taught in or outside of school, helps students excel in the following ways:
- improved language development
- improved test scores
- increased brain connectivity
- increased spatial intelligence
- modest increase in IQ
Perhaps counterintuitively, music can help students excel in science.
Spatial intelligence, for instance, helps students understand how things work together.
This skill is critical in careers like architecture, engineering, math, and computer science.
It’s well-known that Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was an accomplished violinist with a lifelong passion for music.
He believed that the theory of relativity occurred to him by intuition and that music was the driving force.
So, by depriving students of music lessons, we might be depriving the world of its next great scientific genius!
How Music Helps Senior Brains
Just as it’s never too early to start benefiting from music, it’s also never too late.
Seniors who play an instrument, sing, or dance derive physical, psychological, and social benefits from music.
Music protects against memory problems and cognitive decline even more than other leisure activities.
Seniors with musical backgrounds score higher on cognitive tests and show greater mental flexibility than their non-musical counterparts.
Listening to music has been shown to significantly improve working memory in older adults.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet is one of the most successful and wealthy investors in the world.
He also has a hidden talent — he’s an accomplished ukulele player!
Playing the ukulele has helped to keep him mentally sharp into his 90s.
How Music Acts as a Natural Panacea
It seems that music can heal whatever is ailing you, be it a mental health disorder or neurological disease.
Music can alleviate the symptoms of many mood and mental disorders, including:
Music shows promise in treating stroke, autism spectrum disorder, and Alzheimer’s.
Music can also help with the psychological aspects of illness and can improve the quality of life in patients with cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, and chronic pain.
Listening to music reduces the stress experienced by patients both before and after surgery.
It can decrease postoperative confusion and delirium that affects some elderly patients while they’re recovering from surgery.
How Music Therapy Improves Quality of Life
Anyone can play or listen to music for “recreational purposes only” and still reap some benefits.
But when professional health care help is warranted, you can enlist the aid of a music therapist.
Music therapists are trained to use music therapeutically to address their patients’ physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs.
Music therapy has proven useful for treating people with numerous disorders, including autism, dementia, Alzheimer’s, chronic pain, emotional trauma, anxiety, and depression.
The potential benefits of working with a music therapist include improved mood, concentration, and motivation, and decreased anxiety, anger, stress, and frustration.
You can get help finding a music therapist anywhere in the world in this directory published by the American Music Therapy Association.
The Amazing Way Music Therapy Helps Alzheimer’s Patients
One of the most remarkable successes of music therapy is the impact it has on the lives of Alzheimer’s patients.
Advanced Alzheimer’s patients lose their ability to have interactive conversations with others and eventually stop speaking completely.
But music therapy has been very successful in getting through to patients even when nothing else has.
When hearing familiar music, patients often visibly “light up” and sing along.
It seems that musical memories far outlast other kinds of memories.
Caretakers and family members report that, for many patients, music therapy is the best part of their day.
Music therapy does more than help dementia patients remember.
It helps alleviate depression, anxiety, and agitation while improving brain function and overall quality of life.
Music therapy has been found to exert measurable changes in neurotransmitter levels in Alzheimer’s patients, which may be one of the ways it positively affects their brains.
Watch the Video
To learn more about how music therapy changes the lives of elderly people in serious mental decline, I recommend the documentary Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory.
You can stream it or buy it on Amazon.
And if you have a library or university card, you can watch it for free on Kanopy.com.
This movie chronicles the astonishing experiences of nursing home patients whose brains have been reawakened by listening to the music of their youth.
Music Affects Each Brain Differently
One of the common questions from people who want to use music to better themselves is: “What is the best kind of music to listen to?”
The answer is: “It depends.”
First, consider what you hope to achieve.
For example, listening to tunes with lyrics can be distracting if you are trying to learn and process new information.
However, this kind of music can be helpful if you are working on repetitive or mundane tasks.
A surprising finding is that listening to the wrong kind of music for the situation can sometimes be dangerous.
For example, patients who have had heart surgery should not listen to heavy metal music or techno sounds.
Doing so can be stressful and even cause life-threatening arrhythmias.
Second, you’ll always get more benefits from listening to music you like.
One person’s music can be another person’s noise, as any parent of a teenager can attest.
Neuroscientists can now see that music affects each person’s brain differently.
By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that listening to music you like increases blood flow to the brain and brain connectivity more than listening to music you don’t care for.
Also, the number of areas in the brain activated by music varies depending on your musical background and tastes.
Research confirms that the best type of music to increase focus and productivity should first and foremost be music you enjoy.
Additionally, it should be instrumental, have an upbeat tempo, be played at medium volume, and ideally include sounds of nature.
Music Playlists to Boost Mood, Focus, Energy, Relaxation
Spotify
If you want to listen to music specifically to improve your mood, learning, or concentration, the music streaming service Spotify is a good place to start.
Spotify has millions of songs, including a decent catalog of brain-enhancing music.
Once you create a free account, use the search function to access the list of music genres.
There you’ll find playlists created specifically to improve mood and enhance focus.
Browse the “Mood” genre and you’ll find playlists for increasing happiness and confidence.
Other playlists are designed to energize you or calm you down.
If you are looking for music to help you relax or sleep, here’s a curated playlist of the most relaxing songs on Spotify.
It includes Marconi Union’s Weightless which has gotten press as the most relaxing song in the world.
Its creation was a collaboration between musicians and a team of sound therapists.
Listening to Weightless resulted in an impressive 65% reduction in anxiety by reducing heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
Focus@Will
Another music service, Focus@Will, offers scientifically engineered music channels for enhancing focus based on personality type.
Focus@Will is used by employees at forward-thinking companies such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and SpaceX.
These playlists work, in part, by altering brainwave activity to boost focus and attention.
Focus@Will’s research indicates that listening to their music channels can quadruple focus and productivity.
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