Could understanding how the brain processes music help treat illness?

New research is expanding scientists' understanding of how the human brain processes music. We take a look at recent projects examining the interactions of music and neurology and ask what benefits this knowledge might have therapeutically or for future research.

Doctors have long known that listening to music can cause physiological changes. Lower levels of cortisol - the stress hormone - as well as better sleep and a lowered heart rate are associated with listening to music.

To this end, researchers are investigating music therapy as an alternative to anesthesia in some instances. But what is really going on beneath our skulls when our brain digests the humanly organized layers of sound that comprise music?

Recently, Medical News Today reported on a study by Dr. Charles Limb and his team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. Dr. Limb is a musician and surgeon who specializes in cochlear implants. But he also conducts an ongoing body of research work analyzing neurological responses to a variety of music, from jazz to hip-hop.

Groundbreaking in its scope, when Dr. Limb began this research there was little to no scientific literature on this subject.

Music as language

One recurring area of interest in Dr. Limb's work is how musicians' brains are able to compute improvisation. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Dr. Limb and his colleagues investigated which areas of the brain "light up" when jazz musicians are improvising or rappers are "freestyling."

The team's results add some scientific validation to the notion that "music is a universal language." They observed that the areas of the brain activated when jazz players are improvising are actually the language centers of the brain - the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior superior temporal gyrus.

In fact, Dr. Limb's team found that the areas of the brain that people might normally associate with interpreting music - the angular gyrus and the supra marginal gyrus, which process semantic information - are deactivated while musicians are improvising.