How music's resonance effects our brain.

Movies and other forms of visual media can be immersive experience for our eyes but often the unsung hero is the sound design and scoring. From the careful sounds in movies like Interstellar, the DUNE franchise, Hereditary's subtle and eerie sound design, and the immersive orchestration and score for Lord of the Rings, video mediums stir up complex emotions in part by intentionally created sound design.

Even further, director's like Werner Herzog, Ari Aster, and Gasper Noé use subtle sound design to create subconscious emotions viewers don't even know they are experiencing.

Patrick Whelan, a Harvard Medical School lecturer in paediatrics, part-time, at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor of the Harvard Extension School course Music and the Mind, observes that sitting in the audience for this type of piece can be a profound, prosocial experience.

“When you go into a church, the music takes over the mental faculties of all the people who are attending…It puts everyone in the same emotional space.”

Our biological affinity for sound

Surely there must be some reason from a young age we can't help but bob our heads and sway to music. Babies wouldn't clang and bang on pots and pans if there wasn't some inherent reason we love respond to sound.

According to Whelan the answer lies partly in evolutionary biology. Patrick Whelan posits that the earliest mammals relied on their hearing among other sense with much much focus and attention. According to his research, our affinity for sound and music may come from primeval adaptation. In other words, our sensitivity to sound through history has created a strong resonance with the sounds in our environment.

Let's consider a theatre or live experience

There's an incredible complex sound signature all around you…The brain has to sift through all the ambient noise in a concert hall. It’s a much more primitive form of listening compared to a focused conversation.

— Patrick Whelan

Much like the sound of a dangerous predator or environmental threat, music and sound travels through our ears and into our temporal lobe helping us determine whether the sound is familar or unfamiliar. Both grabbing our attention in differing ways.

The influence of sound on our nervous system (ANS) can influence an emotional or motivational response. The ANS controls certain processes, like heart rat and breathing, and thus positive music influence can create positive emotional resoonses and motivation much like negative responses can stir up anxiety or sadness. A minor chord might make use feel nostalgic or associate to a loss, while energetic dance music might influence and energetic and uplifting mood and help motivate us.

Music also lights up nearly all of the brain — including the hippocampus and amygdala, which activate emotional responses to music through memory; the limbic system, which governs pleasure, motivation, and reward; and the body’s motor system. This is why “it’s easy to tap your feet or clap your hands to musical rhythms,” says Andrew Budson, MD ’93, chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System.

Lots of different things are going on simultaneously…ends up being encoded as a rich experience.

— Andrew Budson

The brain’s elaborate receptivity to music means that sound and specifically music can create richer and more memorable experiences.

Musical tension can create intense responses

Research has shown that certain brain disorders show unexpected relationships to listening to music. Though OCD is complex and varied, the suggested physiological causes and evidence suggests that the faulty neurocircuits in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus, and anterior thalamus are involved in decision-making and it's hyperactive both in people with OCD, and, intriguingly, in people as they listen to music.

Why would that be? One key way that music — particularly Western tonal music — generates emotions in the listener is through patterns of tension and resolution. The way such patterns play out, together with the way the music fulfills or violates our expectations, manipulates and reveals how the brain handles complex cognitive processes like prediction and anticipation.

According to Whelan, individuals who are diagnosed with OCD are “incapable of stratifying the risks of the cues that are coming from their environment,”. Their obsessive thoughts stem from consistent thoughts that bad things are innevitable resulting in behaviours and thoughts to attempt to resolve or prevent these possible negative experiences. The belief is that their orbitofrontal cortex runs on overdrive similarly to when people with our without OCD experience while listening to music. In the case of brain disorders, this can be inherently negative even thought they may not be the root cause but the way that music relives this buildup of mental energy is an interesting notion.

So does music heal?

While the reasearch is ongoing and uncovering new discoveries, the effect of music on our brains had clinical implications. As we learn more about the connections to sound and our mind, listening to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major can reduce the frequency of seizures in some people with epilepsy.

Other conditions and diseases, ranging from Parkinson’s to depression to Alzheimer’s, could someday have therapeutic solutions derived from an understanding of music. For instance, by identifying the exact type of music able to provoke a particular cognitive, motor, or emotional response, there could be progress toward healing, improving, or compensating for disrupted brain function in various diseases. An increased understanding of brain mechanisms can facilitate this.

David Silbersweig, the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry, chair emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is on a mission to uncover how brain regions and networks function when we perceive, think, feel, and act.

"We seem to be very much tuned for music…It’s at the systems level with brain imaging that you can directly correlate mental states and brain states — and measure them.” Silbersweig says

Neuroimaging provides a noninvasive way of correlating brain structural and functional abnormalities with specific aspects of music processing.

— David Silbersweig

Music’s immediacy unfolds in real time grabbing our attention without negotiation and forcing in positive ways and ideal vehicle to create specific experiences in our brain. When neurons fire in new and sistinct ways there seem to be long and short-term benefits in carving new pathways in the mind over time.

With all that said, music seems to have real-world benefits and could be a potent tool for wellness and precision medicine. Scientist continue to test and understand our emotional and physiological responses to music and sound and as the research unfolds, it seems that music as medicine is deeply ingrained in us in ways we'll continue to understand with more depth.

As for Silbersweig, he and other colleagues in the field hope to continue weaving together what is known about the neural underpinnings of music into a more unified model, which Silbersweig thinks is an important — and meaningful — step.

We seem to be very much tuned for music…It resonates with us in some important way.

— David Silbersweig‍