Your Brain on Music

(Or: Why I should never be a science major.)

For my Blog post today, I decided to try to research why it is that Music has such a strong pull on us as people, why a string of notes can conjure so many disparate emotions, from joy to the depths of sorrow. After reading through a number of overly complicated journals and underly complicated websites, I’ve been forced to draw one conclusion. I don’t know why Music does this. And, further, no one seems to know why music has this power. On a very simple level, listening music seems to, unlike almost any other activity, cause both halves of your brain to flare up, causing increased activity everywhere in your brain. And good music seems to cause a release of dopamine, the same chemical the brain releases when you shoot heroin or have sex. Music you don’t like, conversely, can go so far as to trigger the part of your medulla which controls the fight-or-flight reflex, and can seriously harm your mental faculties. After all, the CIA drove General Noriega out of his base by playing almost 36 hours of nonstop AC/DC. In summary, then? The research for this blog may have been a failure. But yet, I think there’s some value in this failure. Music has an amazing and miraculous effect on the human mind. And why it does this? Maybe it’s better that we never know.