Music and brain meet-up

Eman youssif

What is music therapy?According to the American Music Therapy Association, “Music Therapy is the clinical

and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed

an approved music therapy program”.

Simply put, we use music to make your life better. Whether you need help socially, cognitively, physically, emotionally, or developmentally, music can help you get

better…and music therapists are well-trained on how to do that.

What’s more interesting, though, is why it works. When used properly, music can be an incredibly powerful treatment tool. And not just because it’s fun, relaxing, and

motivating, but because music has a profound impact on our brains and our bodies.

my top 12 brain-based reasons why music works in therapy:

Music is a core function in our brain. Our brain is primed early on to respond to and process music. Research has shown that day-old infants are able to detect differences in rhythmic patterns. Mothers across cultures and throughout time have used lullabies

and rhythmic rocking to calm crying babies. From an evolutionary standpoint, music precedes language. We don’t yet know why, but our brains are wired to respond to

music, even though it’s not “essential” for our survival.

We have physiologic responses to music. Every time your breathing quickens, your heart-rate increases, or you feel a shiver down your spine, that’s your body responding

physiologically to music. Qualified music therapists can use this to help stimulate a person in a coma or use music to effectively help someone relax.

Children (even infants) respond readily to music. Any parent knows that it’s natural for a child to begin dancing and singing at an early age. My kids both

started rocking to music before they turned one. And have you seen the YouTube video of the baby dancing

to Beyonce? Children learn through music, art, and play, so it’s important (even necessary) to use those

mediums when working with children in therapy.

Music taps into our emotions. Have you ever listened to a piece of music and smiled? Or felt sad? Whether from the music itself, or from our associations with the music, music taps into our emotional systems. Many people use this in a “therapeutic” way, listening to certain music that makes them feel a certain way. The ability for music to

easily access our emotions is very beneficial for music therapists.

Music helps improve our attention skills. I was once working with a 4-year-old in the hospital. Her 10-month-old twin sisters were visiting, playing with Grandma on the bed. As soon as I started singing to the older sister, the twins stopped playing and

stared at me, for a full 3 minutes. Even from an early age, music can grab and hold our attention. This allows music therapists to target attention and impulse control goals,

both basic skills we need to function and succeed.

Music uses shared neural circuits as speech. This is almost a no-brainer (no pun intended), but listening to or singing music with lyrics uses shared neural circuits as

listening to and expressing speech. Music therapists can use this ability to help a child learn to communicate or help someone who’s had a stroke re-learn how to talk again.Music enhances learning. Do you remember how you learned your ABCs? Through a

song! The inherent structure and emotional pull of music makes it an easy tool for teaching concepts, ideas, and information. Music is an effective mnemonic device and

can “tag” information, not only making it easy to learn, but also easy to later recall.

Music taps into our memories. Have you ever been driving, heard a song on the radio, then immediately been taken to a certain place, a specific time in your life, or a particular person? Music is second only to smell for it’s ability to stimulate our

memory in a very powerful way. Music therapists who work with older adults with dementia have countless stories of how music stimulates their clients to reminisce

about their life.Music is a social experience. Our ancestors bonded and passed on their stories and

knowledge through song, stories, and dance. Even today, many of our music experiences are shared with a group, whether playing in band or an elementary music

class, listening to jazz at a restaurant, or singing in church choir. Music makes it easy for music therapists to structure and facilitate a group process

Music is predictable, structured, and organized–and our brain likes it! Music often has a predictable steady beat, organized phrases, and a structured form. If you think of most country/folk/pop/rock songs you know, they’re often organized with a verse-

chorus structure. They’re organized in a way that we like and enjoy listening to over and over again. Even sound waves that make up a single tone or an entire chord are

organized in mathematical ratios–and our brains really like this predictability and structure.

Music is non-invasive, safe and motivating. We can’t forget that most people really enjoy music. This is not the most important reason why music works in therapy, but

it’s the icing on the cake.

Do you have a loved one, friend or family member, who has been diagnosed with suspected Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia? If so, this recorded

program is a must. Doctors have known for years that patients with Alzheimer's and other dementias, respond powerfully to the music of the

“courting years.” Even when the patient no longer recognizes family members and friends, they can still hear the familiar music of their courting years and recognize it, sometimes sing along, but always they derive pleasure from the

experience when others opportunities for pleasure have disappeared.

Dynamic Emotional and Neural Responses to Music Depend on Performance Expression and Listener Experience

Limbic and paralimbic brain areas responded to the expressive dynamics of human music performance, and both emotion and

reward related activations during music listening were dependent upon musical training. Moreover, dynamic changes in

timing predicted ratings of emotional arousal, as well as real-time changes in neural activity.

BOLD signal changes correlated with expressive timing fluctuations in cortical and subcortical motor areas consistent with pulse perception, and in a network

consistent with the human mirror neuron system. These findings show that expressive music performance evokes emotion and reward related neural activations, and that

music's affective impact on the brains of listeners is altered by musical training. Our observations are consistent with

the idea that music performance evokes an emotional response through a form of empathy that is based, at least in part, on the perception of movement and on violations of

pulse-based temporal expectancies.

Dynamic Emotional and Neural Responses to Music Depend on Performance E

Previous neuroimaging work has revealed the involvement of several brain areas in emotional responses to music, focusing on contrasting musical

attributes such as consonant/dissonant, pleasant/unpleasant, and happy/sad. Not surprisingly, areas associated with emotion processing and reward in

general are also involved in emotional responding to music. Parahippocampus and precuneus activity were found to increase in response to increasing

dissonance of short chord sequences

current research has identified emotion related limbic and paralimbic activations (e.g., amygdala, subcallosal gyrus, ventral

anterior cingulate, and parahippocampal gyrus) and reward related activations (in ventral striatum) associated with affective

responses to music .

it may be that activity in the motor areas related to rhythm and pulse perception, IFG 47, and

dACC relate to temporal expectancy and violations of expectancy and that these violations may evoke emotion through

activation of limbic areas such as the amygdala.

current experiment focused on how performance expression influences the dynamic emotional responses to a musical stimulus that unfolds over a period

of minutes. An expressive music performance, recorded by a skilled pianist, with natural variations in timing and sound intensity, was used to evoke

emotion, and a mechanical performance was used to control for compositional aspects of the stimulus

Insular cortex

In each hemisphere of the mammalian brain the insular cortex (often called insula, insulary cortex or insular lobe) is a portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus (the fissure separating the temporal lobe from the parietal and

frontal lobes).

The insulae are believed to be involved in consciousness and play a role in diverse functions usually linked to emotion or the regulation of the body's homeostasis. These functions include perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, and interpersonal experience. In relation to these, it is involved in psychopathology

The insular cortex is divided into two parts: the larger anterior insula and the smaller posterior insula in which more

than a dozen field areas have been identified. The cortical area overlying

the insula toward the lateral surface of the brain is the operculum (meaning

lid). The opercula are formed from parts of the enclosing frontal, temporal, and

parietal lobes.

The right anterior insula aids interoceptive awareness of body states, such as the ability to time one's own heartbeat. Moreover, greater right anterior

insular gray matter volume correlates with increased accuracy in this subjective sense of the inner body, and with negative emotional experience.[2] It is also involved in the control of blood pressure,[3] in particular during

and after exercise,[3] and its activity varies with the amount of effort a person believes he/she is exerting

The insular cortex also is where the sensation of pain is judged as to its degree.

[6] Further, the insula is where a person imagines pain when looking at images of painful events while thinking about their happening to one's own body.[7] Those

with irritable bowel syndrome have abnormal processing of visceral pain in the

insular cortex related to dysfunctional inhibition of pain within the brain

Another perception of the right anterior insula is the degree of nonpainful warmth[9] or nonpainful coldness[10] of a skin

sensation. Other internal sensations processed by the insula include stomach or gastric distension.[11][12] A full bladder also

activates the insular cortex.[13]

One brain imaging study suggests that the unpleasantness of subjectively perceived dyspnea is processed in the right human

anterior insula and amygdala.

The cerebral cortex processing vestibular sensations extends into the insula,[15] with small lesions in the anterior insular cortex

being able to cause loss of balance and vertigo.[16]

Other noninteroceptive perceptions include passive listening to music,[17] laughter, and crying,[18] empathy and compassion,

[19] and language.

The insula has increasingly become the focus of attention for its role in body representation and subjective emotional experience.

In terms of function, the insula is believed to process convergent information to produce an

emotionally relevant context for sensory experience. To be specific, the anterior insula is

related more to olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic function, whereas the posterior insula is related more to auditory-

somesthetic-skeletomotor function. Functional imaging experiments have revealed that the

insula has an important role in pain experience and the experience of a number of basic emotions, including anger, fear, disgust,

happiness, and sadness.

The anterior insular cortex (AIC) is believed to be responsible for emotional feelings, including maternal

and romantic love, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, sexual arousal, disgust, aversion, unfairness, inequity,

indignation, uncertainty, disbelief, social exclusion, trust, empathy, sculptural beauty, a ‘state of union with

God’, and hallucinogenic state.

Functional imaging studies have also implicated the insula in conscious desires, such as food craving and drug craving. What is common to all of

these emotional states is that they each change the body in some way and are associated with highly salient subjective qualities. The insula is well-situated for the integration of information relating to bodily states into

higher-order cognitive and emotional processes. The insula receives information from "homeostatic afferent" sensory pathways via the thalamus and sends output to a number of other limbic-related structures, such as the

amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the orbitofrontal cortex, as well as to motor cortices.

A study using magnetic resonance imaging found that the right anterior insula is significantly thicker in people that meditate[.

sounding waves” can be frequency and pattern modulated by conscious intent in order to yield specific information (interference patterns). Decoded

by the brain they return almost instantly on the “back” of the Schumann Resonance. Once recaptured, the patterns are then decoded by the brain .

://http. . / / : /10.1371/ . .0013812www plosone org article info doi journal pone

Dr. Cash has conducted clinical research on the use of music with Alzheimer's patients, documenting the fact that, even when

other awareness of family and friends are gone, many patients can still hear and recognize the music of their "courting Years." For this reason, Dr. Cash has recorded over 20 tracks of music

from the late 1890's through the 1930's. Even if this music isn't from your courting years, you'll probably recognize many of the

old favorites. This CD will be enjoyed by anyone looking for some relaxing piano music, performed by a concert pianist.

References:://http

. . / / : /10.1371www plosone org article info doi/ . .0013812journal pone