Clutching a silver iPod in his hand, Agustin Iniguez, a fourth-year English student, walks through campus bobbing his head.
“I listen to music the whole day, whether it’s on the stereo, the computer or my iPod,” Iniguez said. “Music makes me feel alive. Sometimes it inspires me.”
Music is a uniquely human phenomenon found across all cultural groups. No other species creates music, said Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute’s Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity.
So far, there is little known about music’s relationship to the brain, but positive effects on overall cognitive abilities are seen through music’s engagement with the entire brain, Molnar-Szakacs said.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging, a device that measures blood flow in the brain in relation to neural activity, is now being used by scientists to study brain activity while people listen to or create music.
Molnar-Szakacs will be applying the use of fMRI and music to study emotion processing in the brains of children with autism, a developmental disorder of the brain.
Children with autism have trouble recognizing emotions, making communication and socializing difficult. However, they may have a heightened sense for music, which could be used as a tool to help them with social engagement and communication.
The study will examine how the brain processes emotion in children with autism by measuring blood flow while listening to pleasant and unpleasant music, Molnar-Szakacs said.
The positive therapeutic effects of music are also being harnessed and utilized in hospitals.
In the hospital setting, music is being used to facilitate communication through a creative process, said Vanya Green, a music therapist at UCLA.
“Music enables an emotional level to be reached that may not be done in other modalities.”
The type of music therapy intervention depends on the music therapist’s assessment of the individual client’s needs, Green said. “It is using sound in a purposeful way.”
In early research about the benefits of music listening, music reportedly improved intelligence, particularly spatial reasoning skills, after listening to a 10-minute Mozart sonata. Dubbed the “Mozart effect” ““ the idea that classical music enhances intelligence in a specific way ““ has since found very little support in the literature, Molnar-Szakacs said.
Participating in music-making or listening to music can have positive effects on the brain, but the idea of a “magic bullet,” or one particular piece of music that will make us all smarter, is false, Molnar-Szakacs said.
“Living in an enriched environment allows you to develop better cognitive abilities, like problem- solving skills or memory skills,” Molnar-Szakacs said. “Music can provide an enriched environment.”
In terms of the evolution of music, archaeological records indicate that music has been an important part of human life and culture.
In the beginning, music was an active social activity. Listening to music included seeing the music maker, the instrument or participating in dance.
The simple nature of conjuring tunes such as “Here comes the bride” occur because centers of the brain that process music and sounds evolved from processing sounds of threat, Molnar-Szakacs said.
Due to the importance of sounds for survival, sounds have a privileged route to the limbic system, which is a set of brain structures involved in emotion processing and to areas important for processing reward, like the nucleus accumbens.
These brain pathways may explain why we seek out and enjoy listening to music that we find pleasurable.
“These pathways are now used for processing all sounds, from a lion’s roar to a Beethoven symphony, allowing us to listen to music and feel incredibly moved,” Molnar-Szakacs said.
“There is music at the mall, music at the gym, music in the car, and music on our phone. We pretty much live with a permanent soundtrack,” he added.