A podcast by Clément Séjourné, Thomas Mainot and Mélanie Silve
Melanie: Hello everybody ! My name’s Melanie, I am here with Clement and Thomas to talk about music and brain. Welcome guys !
Clement: Hello Melanie, hello Thomas ! I’m Clement and I’m a musician. I’ve experienced situations where the music has some therapeutic properties.
Thomas: Hello ! I’m Thomas. I am a psychologist and I will tell you about the different places where I practice music therapy.
Melanie: As some of us are musicians, let’s talk about music effects on the human brain. Everyone has experienced the influence of music on emotions. Some people like to listen to sad music when they feel blue, some others enjoy listening to groovy or rhythmic music to motivate themselves and some pieces of music make people want to dance so strongly that they can’t stop themselves from moving. But we’ll see that listening to music and playing music can also have effects on cognition.
Clement: That’s right, and many researchers are interested in the role music plays in brain development. From an evolutionary point of view, music is an ancestral and universal practice that has contributed to social cohesion. The study of the influence of music on human beings is in the junction between many different scientific disciplines : anthropology, sociology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, musicology, etc. Thanks to cognitive neuroscience, we know that the human brain has specific responses to different emotional dynamics of music from the earliest days of life, and this ability remains intact through aging (Perani et al. 2010, Samson et al. 2009).
Melanie: That’s interesting ! So we can say that music accompanies people from the beginning to the end of their life, then we’ll adopt a developmental stance to describe what music can bring in human life. Some researchers have shown that foetuses already learn from the sounds they hear in utero. Different techniques can be used to measure babies’ reactions to sounds and music. Some studies compare the brain’s event-related potentials of different groups of infants (Partanen et al., 2013), others give newborns connected nonnutritive nipples and produce various feedbacks depending on the babies’ bursts of sucking (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). These studies give some evidence of prenatal learning : newborns not only recognize and react to hearing stimuli, but they also manifest preferences for the sounds they’ve been exposed to in their fetal life. These preferences, especially for their mothers’ voices, may play an important role for the bonding of the babies to their mothers.
Thomas: Indeed, for example in practice, several hospitals use music therapy for infants.
In the perinatal network, parents are sometimes separated from their babies because of emergency care. It is essential for the infant and his parents to quickly re-establish a link in the best conditions.
Music therapy fits well into this perspective. It is a sound-mediated therapy that uses the constituent elements of music (melody, rhythm, intensity…), in order to open the baby’s communication channels, to contribute to the relief of his physical and psychic pain and, in fine, to facilitate his entry into a relationship with his parents. (Sandre,2018)
Clement: And this role continues to be important when growing up. New research shows superior cognitive development in children housed for two years in “musical nurseries” (0 to 3 years). In these establishments, music and rhythm are predominant: music listening sequences for 5 to 20 minutes are offered during the day.These children have a lexical stock that is significantly higher than the average, and results 70% higher on the vocabulary tests on the Weschler intelligence scale are observed a few years later (Caracci, Martel, Le Normand, 2019).
Thomas: Researchers therefore observe an improvement in certain capacities related to intelligence and empathy during the cognitive development of the child in the following years. There are different types of empathy: “social empathy” appears around 1 year old, and cognitive empathy (including theory of mind) around 4½ years old. For example, by anticipating the rhythm of a piece of music, the child develops the social faculty to adapt to the rhythm of others, he will have to understand the tempo of the other and adapt to synchronize at the same rhythm ( Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Nehne & Moll, 2005). Music, and especially rhythm, therefore prepares for “synchronization” and socialization.
For example, music allows a space for sharing and empathetic exchange.At the time I created a music therapy workshop in an ITEP with an educator. The project was simple and we succeeded together in creating a piece of music. With a common goal this could bring the young people together. Moreover, the fact that it was necessary to adapt to others helped to develop their ability to listen and empathize.
Melanie: Coming back to the rhythm, there is a close relationship between rhythmic characteristics of some kinds of music and the physical responses they induce. Nobody dances when watching a painting or a movie, nor when eating something or smelling a perfume. Sounds, and more specifically music is the only stimulus that has this motor effect. Some researchers mention the predictive brain and hypothesize that the regularities on which every type of music is based afford competing hypotheses or predictions about possible outcomes, in contrast to an unpredictable/random stream of sounds (like talking). The temporal structure, based on a pulse, can include some music featured events that challenge metrical expectations, like syncopations, which lead to a drive to move, especially when used repeatedly. That’s what musicians call “groove”. Given a constant tempo, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the amount of syncopation in a given rhythm, our “wanting to move” and accompanying feelings of pleasure (Koelsch et al. 2019). In sum, when there is no surprise, like in a military march, the brain can predict every musical event. When the music contains too many syncopations, like in free jazz, it makes it difficult for an uninitiated to keep the pulse. In both cases, most people don’t feel like dancing. There is an optimal level of syncopation where the brain is able to make predictions, and the physical moves are here to fill the voids created by this syncopation.
Clement: We can also speak of the theories of Merlin Donald (Origins of the modern mind, 1991) who proposes that “rhythm is an integrative mimetic capacity”. According to him, rhythm is an obligatory condition for music, empathy and various non-verbal comprehension skills. Music and more particularly rhythms, provide a better connection between associative areas in order to generate motor responses (Sacks, Musicophilia, 2009).
Thomas: Furthermore, these connections persist during time. We have known for several years that many musicians with Alzheimer’s disease can still play pieces of music by heart because they belong to procedural memory. In this pathology, the last register is that of implicit memory, which is the most resistant to brain damage (Bigand & Tillman, 2019).
Melanie: Some researchers tested autobiographical memories when listening to pieces of music. The results show that more than 30% of the songs evoked personal memories, the knowledge being correlated with the emotions felt for these songs. There are new so-called “reminiscence” therapies where music helps reconnect with autobiographical memory in the case of dementia.
Clement: All these arguments show the interest of using music in therapy, even if more research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying these effects.
Thanks for listening !