Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Hurdy-
Gurdy Hare
, and my mother had overheard a line. The plot was standard
Looney Tunes fare, with dollops of humor for both adults and children,
involving an escaped gorilla now after Bugs. After a lot of antics, the gorilla
traps Bugs Bunny in the back room of an apartment. Conveniently, and in
the nick of time, Bugs finds a violin and begins playing. Immediately the
gorilla calms down, then begins moving to the music. Bugs says snarkily
says to the camera, “They say music calms the savage beast.” I did not see
what happened next because of my mom’s comment. She was right, of
course. According to scholars, the line is from the pen of 17th-century
playwright William Congreve, and properly reads “Music hath charms to
soothe the savage breast
.
”
Either way, music’s ability to affect one’s mood and subsequent
behavior is a common theme in literature. Researchers will tell you the

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reason is biochemical. It is a surprisingly well-established fact that music
can induce hormonal changes. These changes result in alterations of mood.
Well duh, say music fans around the world. Anybody who has ever listened
to their favorite song could testify to 
that
. It is not earth-shattering to find
that music can induce pleasure. “Enjoyment arousal,” as it’s called, is
sometimes accompanied by a temporary boost in certain skills. For that, we
can thank three hormones: dopamine, cortisol, and oxytocin.
Dopamine
Noted Canadian researcher Robert Zatorre has studied people’s
emotional reactions to music for a long time. He and his colleagues have
found that when people hear their very favorite music (I mean spine-
tingling, awe-inspiring, fly-me-to-the-moon music), their bodies dump
dopamine into a specific part of their brain.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, involved in mediating processes from
feeling pleasure to memory formation. It floods the striatal system, a curved
structure in the middle of the brain that’s involved in many functions,
including evaluating the significance you assign to a given stimulus. Zatorre
found that when you hear music that gives you goose bumps (called
“musical frisson”), the striatal system is activated via dopamine release.
Music may soothe the savage human by exploiting this mechanism.
Cortisol
Surgery is not a pleasurable experience for most people. Some patients
are genuinely freaked out, however, to the point of requiring medical
intervention. Researchers asked, “Could music reduce the stress of people
about to undergo surgery?” To answer the question, they divided 372
patients into two groups. The first group would listen to music before going
under the knife. The second group would take an antistress pill (midazolam)
prior to surgery.
Who experienced the least amount of stress, as measured by respiration
and heart rate, among other assays? The music group. They felt 13 percent
less anxious than the stress-pill group before their surgeries. Listening to
classical or meditation music had the greatest effect.

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Oxytocin
Oxytocin plays a huge role in social bonding. This talented molecule
stimulates temporary feelings of trust, orgasms, lactation, and even birth
(pitocin, a drug that induces contractions, is a synthetic form of oxytocin). It
even gets some mammals, like the prairie vole, to mate for life. Given this
social track record, it is a big deal when the brain increases its production of
oxytocin as a response to some external cue.
Researchers have discovered that when people sing as a group, as they
would in a choir, oxytocin courses through their brains. An uptick in the
hormone is a fairly reliable indicator of feelings of trust, love, and
acceptance. This may explain why people in a choir often report feeling so
close to each other.
University of Montreal researcher Dan Levitin, in an interview with
NPR, said the same of playing music together: “We now know that when
people play music together, oxytocin is released. … This is the bonding
hormone that’s released when people have an orgasm together. And so you
have to ask yourself, that can’t be a coincidence; there had to be some
evolutionary pressure there. Language doesn’t produce it, music does. …”
This flies in the face of Pinker’s auditory cheesecake, as you may have
noted.
These data suggest a mechanism whereby music makes people happy,
calms them down, maybe even makes them feel close to each other. I can
personally attest to these feelings.
My wife is a classically trained pianist and a composer (she scores
documentaries). In the past few years, she has really gotten into Irish,
Scottish, and Celtic music. One gorgeous Gaelic song she regularly listens
to speaks to me also. I’m hydrated with this glorious cocktail of haunting,
calming, restful feelings, right from its opening bars. That turned out to be
important on a day we had driven from Seattle to Vancouver, British
Columbia. We were on vacation, and I was not having a restful time at all. It
was downtown at rush hour—Vancouver at its worst—and I was in a slow
burn trying to find our hotel, my tension increasing with every missed
intersection. Stress hormones were boiling my blood, something my wife is
good at detecting. She found the CD with that Gaelic song, slipped it into
the car stereo, and played it full volume. From a distance I detected the

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calming feelings. I attempted to give in to them and immediately felt peace
wash over me. We quickly found our lodgings. As I can attest, the calming
ability of music can be very pleasurable … especially for the other people
in the car.
But more importantly, these hormones represent a powerful effort from
researchers to transform anecdotal, ephemeral impressions about the power
of music into the exacting physical world of cells and molecules. The
findings may have medical implications.
The promise of music therapy
Using music as medicine for sick patients has a long history. The Greek
physician Hippocrates prescribed it for mentally ill patients. During World
War I, hospitals in the UK employed musicians to play for wounded
soldiers in convalescence. It seemed not only to calm them down but also to
reduce their pain. None of this was measured in any formal way at the time,
but the observation was so persistent that the practice continued into World
War II. Observations like these eventually led to the establishment of formal
music-therapy associations.
Slowly but surely, these anecdotal observations attracted the notice of
the research community, and clear findings have emerged. Music has been
shown to aid speech recovery in head-trauma patients, for example.
Gabrielle Giffords (the US representative who survived a gunshot to the
head) regained regular speech in part by singing. Researchers think it works
by forcing the brain to sign up unused regions of the brain for speech duty.
Nobody knows why music does this. Dr. Oliver Sacks, interviewed about
Giffords’s recovery in a documentary, said: “Nothing activates the brain so
extensively as music. It has been possible to create a new language area in
the right hemisphere. And that blew my mind.”
Music improves the recovery rates of specific cognitive abilities in
stroke patients. In one study, patients who underwent six months of music
therapy were compared to patients who got “talk therapy.” The results were
extraordinary. In measurements of verbal memory, the talk therapy patients
achieved a score of 7 (that’s not so good). The music group achieved a
score of 23 (that’s really good). Measurements of focused attention showed
a similar disparity: the talk-therapy group scored a 1, while the music-

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therapy group scored an 11. In overall language skills at the end of six
months, the talk-therapy group scored a 5. The music-therapy group scored
a 21.
Among stroke patients with motor difficulties, including those with
Parkinson’s and cerebral palsy, researchers find similar positive results.
Music-therapy patients routinely outscore patients exposed to more
traditional therapies in measurements of arm movements and of gait as they
walk. Music seems to serve as a predictable metronome that helps people
coordinate their movements.
Most of these studies have been done on adults, often our oldest
citizens. What about some of our youngest?
Prematurely born infants, living in a hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care
Unit (NICU), gained weight more rapidly when music was played. Music
helped them learn how to suck at their mothers’ breasts more readily. It also
reduced their overall stress levels, which may explain the other findings.
One study found that female (though not male) infants’ stay in the unit
would be decreased by 11 days if music were played, compared to no
music. It is now standard for hospitals across the country to pipe calm,
peaceful music into their NICUs.
Why does music have these effects? Again, we don’t know for sure.
One idea, the “arousal and mood hypothesis,” was published in 2001. It
proposed that the three hormones explain why music speeds recovery. It’s
still just a hypothesis, but it’s paving the way for some serious
neuroscience. Stay tuned.
More ideas
Too many of these intriguing studies don’t 
prove
cause, and they’re all done
in a lab setting. I’d like to see a school district take up research on music
programs and help determine the effects of music training in a real-world
setting. As soon as kids enter first grade, schools would randomly assign a
large number of them to one of two groups. The first group would take
lessons on a musical instrument, with formal instruction and ensemble
training. Lessons would be daily, consistent, and as mandatory as math

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class. The program would last at least 10 years, ending when the students
are juniors in high school. The second group would receive no music
training.
With this kind of large-scale, long-term research program, we could see
whether students who get music training perform better on tests involving
speech proficiency at the end of the 10-year period than those without the
training. And language arts. And second languages. Since emotional
regulation has such a powerful effect on academic performance (see the
Stress chapter), additional questions are relevant as well. We could see if
the kids with music training have better emotional regulation. If they get
better grades. If they’re more cooperative in group settings not related to
music. If music training reduces antisocial behavior, such as bullying, at
school. Music training almost certainly teaches discipline, a form of
impulse control (you continue practicing for 10 years, even if you’d rather
not).
If the answer was affirmative to even one of these questions, we would
end up with a truly interesting principle: One way to create a higher-
functioning student is to hire back band teacher Ray Vizcarra. And if it
comes time to cut the school budget, the last activity to go would be formal
musical training.