Podcast Episode 20: Art, Music and Wellbeing

Hello, my name is Ana. I'm a fifth year medical student in Barcelona, Spain. As well, I am a soul and blues singer, so let's going to talk about music. Music, like language, is a universal feature across all human society, both ancient and modern. Moreover we speak with melodies to express our emotion. Try playing a YouTube video in a foreign language and close your eyes. You'll be able to detect if that person is angry or sad or happy. How is this possible? Moreover music has a huge power to evoke memories. It stimulates us on several levels. When you hear music that you like, you want to get up and dance or tap your feet or your fingers. Music also affects us at the biological level. Internally it can affect blood pressure, heart rate, hormones. Externally it can give us goosebumps, can drive us to tears. Let's try one thing. I'll put an excerpt of music and you'll say to me what emotion brings to you. First one is this Have you felt happy or sad? I'll say that happy is your answer, isn't it? Let's try another one. Have you felt sad? Cause me too. Most of us will have felt same, hence there are similarities in our feelings. However, if we have language to communicate between us, a tool to pass information, ideas, skills, why we need music? When we look at the areas in the brain that are active when we process music and language, with MRI for example, there are some areas of overlap, which suggests that perhaps music and language evolved from a common precursor. There are also differences, in most people language is processed on the left side of the brain, left hemisphere, whereas music processes more on the right side. Music also activates the limbic system, a complex structure on the brain that is involved in learning and memory and also on our emotional responses. Music also activates a reward center, the amygdala, that is also stimulated by other pleasant activities such as having sex or eating chocolate. The amygdala is part of the limbic system. Moreover, music activates regions in the frontal lobe. This one plays a role in many higher level functions such as revelation of emotions and mood, attention and concentration, reasoning and judgment, impulse control. When frontal lobe is damaged, patients can lose behavior manners, for example, they say things that they would never say, they lose their empathy and even more, they can be apathy, they may have trouble with language, that is called aphasia. Also, music affects the chemical transmitters in our brain or our hormones. For example, when you're listening to a piece you are familiar with, there's always an emotional peak and you are expecting it, you are anticipating it. In that moment, dopamine is released in a certain part of the brain. When the emotional peak arrives, the climax, there is a sudden burst of dopamine in a north part of the brain that is associated with the reward areas. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is involved with reward-motivated behavior and motor control. For example, Parkinson's is caused by the loss of dopamine. plays important roles in motivation, arousal, executive functions. Dopamine is very important in addictions. It has been seen that when we are doing tasks that require empathy, we activate the same areas that we activate when we listen to pleasant music. About hormones, it has been seen that the levels of a hormone called oxytocin in the bloodstream are raised when we are singing together but particularly when singers are improvising together. What oxytocin is? Well, it's a hormone that is associated with empathy, trust, relationship building... For example, it's really important for the bond between mother and baby. That's why it's so important the skin-to-skin technique. For those who don't know, it's putting the baby against the mother's chest shortly after giving birth. Our Our sensitivity to pain is also decreased when we are involved in group music-making activities as our levels of the stress hormone called cortisol. So we can see that music is important for mental and physical well-being but we'll talk more about it in the other episode. Let's go back to the beginning, music and language. Now that we have explained more about the effects of music in our brain, we understand more the importance about music. In the other episode, we'll talk more about the therapeutic effects of music in people with dementia, they unlock memories through music, or people with autism that helps them empathize more. Many people believe that music evolved from an earlier system that was just largely an emotional form of communication, an emotional proto-language. To get a glimpse of what that early proto-language might have been like, we have to look on how a mother or father talks to a baby. When infants are prelinguistic, all they have is their tone of voice, so pitch is used much more in earlier speech. At some point, this proto-language is split into language, which carried more information, and music continued to carry the message of emotion. Music binds us in a way that language rarely does. It's a social communication system that for tens of thousands of years has helped us come together and to work together. When we make, listen or sing music, we forget our individual fears, concerns, worries. We are united, expressing and feeling emotions without shame, without judgement. That's the power of music. .