It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley, or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain. That’s one of the things Dr. Jonathan Burdette has found in his research at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
“Music is primal. It affects all of us but in very personal, unique ways,” said Burdette, a WFBMC neuroradiologist. “Your brain has a reaction when you like or don’t like something, including music. We’ve been able to take some baby steps into seeing that, and ’dislike’ looks different from ’like’ and much different from ’favorite.’”
To study how music preferences might affect functional brain connectivity, Burdette and his fellow investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Scans were made of 21 people while they listened to music most “liked” and “disliked” from five genres (classical, country, rap, rock and Chinese opera) and to music named as their personal favorite.
Dr. Jonathan Burdette in the music room of his Winston-Salem home.
A neuroradiologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Burdette has conducted
research into the effects of music on the brain.
Credit: Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Photography
The MRI scans showed a consistent pattern: The listeners’ preferences, not the type of music they were listening to, had the greatest impact on brain connectivity, especially on internally focused thought, empathy and self-awareness. This circuit, called the default mode network, was poorly connected when the participants were listening to the music they disliked, better connected when listening to the music they liked, and the most connected when listening to their favorites.
The researchers also found that listening to favorite songs altered the connectivity between auditory brain areas and a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation.
“Given that music preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena, the consistency of our results was unexpected,” the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. “These findings may explain why comparable emotional and mental states can be experienced by people listening to music that differs as widely as Beethoven and Eminem.”
Not surprising to Burdette was the extent of the connectivity seen in the participants’ brains when they were listening to their favorite tunes. “In some cases, you might not even like the particular song, but you like the memories or feelings that you associate with it.”
In other research projects, Burdette and colleagues at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro have found that trained music conductors are likely to be better at combining and using auditory and visual clues than people without musical training; that activity in brain areas associated with vision decreases during tasks that involve listening; and that different levels of complexity in music can have different effects on functional brain connectivity.
“I find this type of work fascinating, because I think music is so important,” Burdette said. “If science can help get more people to recognize what music does to and for us, great.”
By Wayne Mogielnicki
Wake Forest Baptist Healthwire