Music and the brain

Why does music makes us shiver?

It is a wonderful thing, music. People spend more on music than on any other item (yes, even more than on sex). It fascinates and moves, it provokes emotions and makes our hairs stand on end. And it may make people run away screaming, or scare away youth from their favourite hang-out spot.

Probably the best book on the biological basis of music, making a beginning to explain these phenomena, is Daniel Levitin's This is your brain on music. Levitin was a musician , sound engineer and producer and worked for and with Stevie Wonder, Blue Oyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Santana, The Greatful Dead, Steeley Dan and many others. He also started studying cognitive sciences and in the end switched from the studio to the lab and the scanner. He now heads the department of Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at Montreal's McGill University.

Levitin shows in his experiments that music triggers the brain circuits that are involved in recognising patterns and emotions. The brain reacts especially when it detects patterns that deviate from the expected.

The corpus callosum, the bridge between left and right brain is bigger in musicians. The brain areas responsible for movement, for visual, auditory and spatial information processing are differently developed from writers or painters. It is far from clear how these differences arise, be it from genetic predispositions or from a lot of exercise.

We also know that the brain is a set of different tools, some of which can be damaged by brain disease. That explains why some people loose the ability to hear or use rhythm, while retaining pitch and melody.

Still unexplained is the evolutionary significance of music (if there is any). It could be an evolutionary accident piggybacking on the capability of language. A competing view, one that Darwin held, is that music signals some kinds of intellectual, physical or sexual fitness. The jury is still out on this.

Just as on the fact that it can move people so profoundly, while it is just a conjunction of sound waves in various frequencies hitting the ear. We only know it hits the same areas in the brain that light up while experiencing an orgasm or when eating chocolate. Serotonin and dopamine are two of the neurotransmitters involved. The former may explain why music sooths the brain and may help relieving depression.

For even more illuminating stuff on how the musical brain created human nature, read Levitin's latest The world in six songs.