The Effect of Music on the Brain
The way a person views something either physically or emotionally can be influenced by the effect of the music he or she listens to. The full affects music can have on the brain were previously unknown to mankind until the advancement of brain imaging in the nineties. It seems to have the ability to affect emotions in severe degrees as well as affect physical body functions during exercise for example.
Until the expansion of brain imaging in the earl nineties, the magnitude of the brain’s connection to music was hardly imagined. We now know that when a person listens to music, it is managed in many different lobes and areas of the brain. For example, when we hear a beat or a song and our foot starts to tap that is because of the cerebellum and motor cortex which control parts of body movement. The way music affects a person emotionally is handled in the amygdala and the memory of how a certain song made us feel is stored in the hippocampus.
Happy and sad music can actually have a part in determining the way we see other people. One study presented that when a person was shown a face with a neutral expression, not easily discernable from happy or sad, accompanied with sad music the subject would view the neutral face as being sad. With the same neutral face played with happy music, the subjects viewed the face as happy. This happened with other facial expressions but were most prominent for the neutral faces.
An interesting fact about how music affects our emotions is it can effect two kinds of emotion: felt emotions and perceived emotions. Perceived emotions come from when we listen to music and can understand the emotions tied to a piece of music without actually feeling them. These emotions could felt by listening to a song about war where the listener understand the hardships of a soldier’s duty in combat but doesn’t actually feel any threat or danger when listening to it- more or less like vicarious emotions.
Physical exercise is often long, tedious and very strenuous on human mind and body. So why does listening to music make exercise easier? Research to this question has been done for