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Researchers want to better understand what happens in your brain when you listen to music.

(CNN) -- Whether you are rocking out to Macklemore & Ryan Lewisin your car or reading with Bach in your bedroom, music has aspecial ability to pump us up or calm us down.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what's going on in our brainswhen we listen to music and how it produces such potent effects onthe psyche.

"We're using music to better understand brain function in general,"said Daniel Levitin, a prominent psychologist who studies theneuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal.

Three studies published this month explore how the brain respondsto music. The quest to dissect exactly what chemical processesoccur when we put our headphones on is far from over, but scientistshave come across some clues.

Health benefits of music

Listening to music feels good, but can that translate into physiologicalbenefit? Levitin and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 400studies in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, suggesting theanswer is yes.

In one study reviewed, researchers studied patients who were aboutto undergo surgery. Participants were randomly assigned to either

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Inside Your Brain

This is your brain on musicBy Elizabeth Landau, CNNupdated 12:09 PM EDT, Mon April 15, 2013

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Music was shown to loweranxiety more than medicationsin one study

Brain activation patterns arerelated to how much people likeparticular songs

Consistent activity patterns areseen when different peoplelisten to the same music

Researchers may gain insightsinto neurological and psychiatricissues

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listen to music or take anti-anxiety drugs.Scientists tracked patient's ratings of theirown anxiety, as well as the levels of thestress hormone cortisol.

The results: The patients who listened tomusic had less anxiety and lower cortisolthan people who took drugs. Levitincautioned that this is only one study, andmore research needs to be done to confirm

the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.

"The promise here is that music is arguably less expensive thandrugs, and it's easier on the body and it doesn't have side effects,"Levitin said.

Levitin and colleagues also highlighted evidence that music isassociated with immunoglobin A, an antibody linked to immunity, aswell as higher counts of cells that fight germs and bacteria.

More: How music changes the brain

What music we like

So music is good for us, but how do we judge what musicis pleasurable? A study published in the journal Sciencesuggests that patterns of brain activity can indicatewhether a person likes what he or she is hearing.

Valorie Salimpoor, a researcher at the Rotman Research Institute inToronto and former Levitin student, led a study in which participantslistened to 60 excerpts of music they had never heard before while ina functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The 19 participants were asked to indicate how much money theywould spend on a given song when listening to the excerpts, whilealso allowing researchers to analyze patterns of brain activity throughthe fMRI. Such a small number of participants is common in an fMRIstudy for reasons of complexity and cost, although it suggests moreresearch should be done.

The study authors highlight in their results a brain area called thenucleus accumbens, which is involved in forming expectations.

"There is actually a network of activity that predicts whether or notyou're going to buy this music as you're listening to the music,"Salimpoor said.

The more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the more money peoplesaid they were willing to spend on any particular song in the "auction"set-up that the researchers designed.

"This was an indicator that some sort of reward-related expectationswere met or surpassed," she said.

Another brain area called the superior temporal gyrus is intimatelyinvolved in the experience of music, and its connection to the nucleusaccumbens is important, she said. The genres of music that a personlistens to over a lifetime impact how the superior temporal gyrus isformed.

The superior temporal gyrus alone doesn't predict whether a personlikes a given piece of music, but it's involved in storing templatesfrom what you've heard before. For instance, a person who hasheard a lot of jazz before is more likely to appreciate a given piece ofjazz music than someone with a lot less experience.

"The brain kind of works like a music recommendation system,"

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Salimpoor said.

You can listen to the clips that the researchers used in the studyhere.

Levitin called the findings "interesting," but views it as a refinement ofwhat other laboratories have found in the past. He and Vinod Menonat Stanford University were the first to show the role of the nucleusaccumbens in music in 2005.

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Are we all hearing the same thing?

It seems intuitive that different people, based on their personalities,preferences and personal histories of listening to particular music,will have different experiences when exposed to a particular piece ofmusic. Their attention to various details will vary and they might likedifferent things about it.

But Levitin and his collaborators showed in a European Journal ofNeuroscience study that, from the perspective of the brain, there maybe more similarities among music listeners than you think.

"Despite our idiosyncrasies in listening, the brain experiences musicin a very consistent fashion across subjects," said Daniel Abrams,lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford UniversitySchool of Medicine.

Seventeen participants who had little or no music training took part inthis study which, like Salimpoor's, is small, but typical for an fMRIstudy. Participants listened to four symphonies by composer WilliamBoyce of the late Baroque period, which the researchers chosebecause they reflect Western music but were likely to be unfamiliar tosubjects.

Among participants, the researchers found synchronization in severalkey brain areas, and similar brain activity patterns in different peoplewho listen to the same music. This suggests that the participants notonly perceive the music the same way, but, despite whateverpersonal differences they brought to the table, there's a level onwhich they share a common experience.

Brain regions involved in movement, attention, planning and memoryconsistently showed activation when participants listened to music --these are structures that don't have to do with auditory processingitself. This means that when we experience of music, a lot of otherthings are going on beyond merely processing sound, Abrams said.

One resulting theory is that these brain areas are involved in holdingparticular parts of a song, such as the melody, in the mind while therest of the piece of music plays on, Abrams said.

The results also reflect the power of music to unite people, Levitinsaid.

"It's not our natural tendency to thrust ourselves into a crowd of20,000 people, but for a Muse concert or a Radiohead concert we'lldo it," Levitin said. "There's this unifying force that comes from themusic, and we don't get that from other things."

Further research might compare how individuals with healthy brainsdiffer in their musical listening compared to people with autism orother brain disorders, Abrams said.

"The methods that we've used can be applied to understand how thebrain tracks auditory information over time," Abrams said.

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What the brain draws from: Art and neuroscience

What's next

The next frontier in the neuroscience of music is to look morecarefully at which chemicals in the brain are involved in musiclistening and performing, Levitin said, and in which parts of the brainare they active.

Any given neurochemical can have different function depending onits area of the brain, he said. For instance, dopamine helps increaseattention in the frontal lobes, but in the limbic system it is associatedwith pleasure.

By using music as a window into the function of a healthy brain,researchers may gain insights into a slew of neurological andpsychiatric problems, he said.

"Knowing better how the brain is organized, how it functions, whatchemical messengers are working and how they're working -- that willallow us to formulate treatments for people with brain injury, or tocombat diseases or disorders or even psychiatric problems," Levitinsaid.

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