Huberman Lab: How to Use Music to Boost Motivation, Mood & Improve Learning

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

Music is a neurological phenomenon that activates different parts of the brain and can shift emotions, enhance learning and memory, and promote brain plasticity. It is believed to be a fundamental form of human communication that can evoke empathy. Music can convey emotions, imply intent, and generate action within us. Listening to music for 10 to 30 minutes per day can positively impact our bodily physiology, including heart rate and heart rate variability.

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00:30:00 - 01:00:00

This episode of the Huberman Lab podcast explores the power of music in evoking physiological responses and increasing motivation. It discusses the activation of neural circuits in the brain and body when listening to music, which can lead to increased motivation. The podcast also provides insights into specific neural circuits and their role in mobilizing the body, as well as a protocol for leveraging music to enhance motivation. It mentions that listening to music, especially faster music, can significantly increase motivation prior to exercise or cognitive work.

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01:00:00 - 01:30:00

The podcast discusses the impact of music on the brain and its role in learning and motivation. It suggests that listening to music before engaging in a task can be motivating, but silence or instrumental music is better for cognitive tasks that require focus and concentration. It also highlights the importance of taking breaks and listening to music in between bouts of cognitive work to enhance focus and learning. For physical exertion, the effects of music on performance vary depending on the individual and the type of exercise.

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01:30:00 - 01:44:20

Learning to play a musical instrument or sing, especially at a young age, has been shown to enhance brain connectivity and neuroplasticity. This increased connectivity can improve cognitive abilities, language learning, and even mathematical skills. Listening to novel forms of music also activates brain circuitry and promotes better learning and comprehension. Overall, engaging with music can have positive effects on brain function and learning.

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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor

in neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are discussing music and your brain.

However, this episode could have just as easily

been entitled, music is your brain or your brain is music.

And that's because music, believe it or not,

is a neurological phenomenon.

Most of us think of music as something

that happens outside of us, the sounds we hear,

the lyrics we hear, their meaning,

how they anchor us to pieces of our history,

both emotional or social.

It turns out that when we listen to music,

it activates nearly every piece of our brain.

Moreover, when we listen to music,

it activates our brain in ways that our brain itself,

and indeed our body as well, help to create that music

at the level of so-called neural ensembles,

that is the firing of neurons.

In other words, when we listen to music,

our brain and our body become part of the instrument

that contributes to our perception of that music.

Today I'm going to make clear how all of that happens.

We will also discuss how music can be leveraged

towards shifting our brain states and our bodily states.

For instance, what sorts of music to listen to

in order to make ourselves happy?

Yes, studies have been done on that,

as well as how long to listen to music

in order to shift our mood or our overall bodily state,

including how to process feelings of sadness.

Many of you are probably familiar with particular songs

that anchor us to particular times in our history

or people in our history.

And there's an age-old question really

as to whether or not listening to sad music

can help us process our feelings of sadness

or whether or not they drive us further down the spiral

of sadness and despair.

And indeed, studies have explored this as well.

So today I will explain how music,

indeed how different types of music,

activate different neural circuits in your brain

to create different brain and bodily states,

how we can leverage music toward things

like emotional processing, shifting our emotions,

as well as to enhance learning and memory.

And we will also talk about the use of music

to enhance brain plasticity.

That is your brain's ability to change

in response to experience,

not just in response to that music,

but rather using music as a tool

to expand our capacity for neural plasticity,

giving us the ability to learn far more

in other contexts and areas of life.

I confess that in researching this episode,

I found myself continually delighted as to, first of all,

how impressive the science of the study of music

in the brain is.

And secondly, how fundamental music is to all of our lives.

And this is true whether or not you're somebody

who listens to music often

or you're somebody that really prefers silence.

Indeed, we will talk about whether or not

it's better to listen to music

or remain in silence when you perform certain kinds of work.

It turns out that there's a very clear answer to that.

If you want a little bit of a hint,

it is best to listen to music in between bouts of work

or during brief rest periods,

as opposed to listening to music while you work.

And for those of you that listen to music while you work

and thoroughly enjoy listening to music while you work,

we will also discuss what that means

about your brain in particular,

because it's likely that it got wired up that way

at a particular phase of development.

And each and all of you can learn today

how to best leverage music toward productivity,

but perhaps equally important,

how to leverage music for enrichment and enjoyment of life.

I'm pleased to announce

that we will be hosting three live events in Australia.

All three events will cover science and science-related tools

for mental health, physical health, and performance.

There will also be a live question and answer session.

The first live event will take place

on February 10th in Melbourne at the Plenary Theater.

The second live event will take place

on February 17th in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House.

And the third event will take place on February 23rd

in Brisbane at the Great Hall.

To access tickets to any of these events,

simply go to hubermanlab.com slash tour

and use the code Huberman.

I hope to see you there.

And last but certainly not least,

thank you for your interest in science.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

that this podcast is separate

from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort

to bring zero cost to consumer information

about science and science-related tools

to the general public.

In keeping with that theme,

I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is AteSleep.

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I've spoken many times before on this podcast

about the fact that sleep,

that is getting enough quality sleep each night,

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One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep

is to make sure that your body temperature drops

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If you'd like to try an AteSleep mattress cover,

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Again, that's AteSleep.com slash Huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka.

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Okay, let's talk about music and your brain.

And to start off, I just wanna take a step back

and acknowledge something that is absolutely remarkable

about music, which is if you think about language,

I could describe to you a glass,

I could describe to you an apple,

I could describe to you a story,

I could describe to you a face,

I could describe to you any number of different things

and you could do the same for me.

Language is essentially infinite

in the number of things that it can explain

and the ways that it can explain it.

And yet, if you think about music,

music provided there are no lyrics in that music

can't explain how a glass is shaped.

It can't even tell you

that there's a glass present in the room or on a table.

It can't tell you what a face looks like.

It can't tell you what that person

who owns that face did or is doing.

So in some ways, you might think, wow,

music is fairly diminished

in terms of its qualitative depth compared to language.

And yet, if you take a step back

and think about what music can do,

it's astonishing and it actually overwhelms

what language can do.

What can music do?

Well, even in the absence of any lyrics,

any words put to music, music can describe an emotion.

In fact, music can describe numerous types of emotions

and they can do it with a lot of nuance.

So not just displaying for us happy or sad,

but rather different degrees of happiness,

different degrees of sadness.

Music can be used to convey a sense of longing,

a sense of nostalgia, a sense of delight,

a sense of awe and on and on.

So whereas music can't describe nouns very well,

it can beautifully describe emotions.

And not only can music describe emotions

with a tremendous degree of nuance,

music can evoke emotions with a tremendous degree of nuance.

Now this is spectacular.

And it's not only spectacular, it is important

because as we move through today's episode,

you'll soon come to realize that it's very likely,

and indeed we have a lot of scientific evidence

to support the fact,

that music evolved prior to spoken language.

Moreover, it's very likely

that singing evolved prior to spoken language

and that music, singing and dance together

evolved prior to language.

Making music as well as singing and dance,

but really just music even on its own

in the absence of any lyrics or any bodily movement

as the fundamental form of human communication.

Indeed, music can evoke empathy.

Again, we're talking about music

in the absence of any lyrics.

And when I say music can evoke empathy,

I'm not talking about the sort of empathy

where you look at somebody and nod and understand

so-called cognitive empathy,

which is important by the way in relational dynamics,

or emotional empathy,

where you're actually feeling

what the other person is feeling.

But of course, you never really know

what somebody else is feeling.

How could you?

You can only have a sense of what they might be feeling

and you have a sense of what you're feeling.

But let's be honest,

as one of our prior guests on the Huberman Lab podcast,

Dr. Carl Deiseroth, so aptly noted,

rarely do we ever understand how anyone else truly feels

because indeed rarely do we ever understand

how we ourselves truly feel.

And certainly with language,

it's very hard to explain our feelings with words

in a way that can convey the way that we feel

with the kind of nuance that represents our own reality.

Even in a state of extreme happiness or extreme sadness,

words fall short of explaining how we feel inside.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier,

music not only can describe emotions,

it can evoke emotions within us.

And in doing so, it can evoke emotions

that give us a sense of empathy

for the person playing the music

or simply for others in the world.

And music can do that so powerfully

because not only does music come in through our ears,

and we'll talk about the process of how sound

is converted into what we perceive as music in a little bit

because indeed it comes in through our ears

and we can hear that music, of course.

But the nerve cells, the neurons in your brain,

as well as the nerve cells in your body

can become activated by music in a way

that the firing of those neurons,

literally the frequency of those neural impulses

comes to match the frequency of the sounds

that you're hearing in your outside environment.

In other words, when you listen to music,

not only is that music coming into your body

through your sense organs, your hearing,

but your body itself is an instrument

playing that music from within.

So for instance, if you listen to a piece of music

that has a lightness to it, that evokes a sense in you

of the turning of the seasons from winter to spring.

It's something that's common in certain classical music

but other forms of music as well.

When you hear that music, indeed,

it's coming in through your ears,

but also the firing of the neurons in your brain and body,

responding to those particular frequencies of sound

is such that your body itself is an instrument

playing that sense of the turning of the seasons

from winter to spring within you,

which is why your body starts to feel lifted in some cases

or it starts to feel a lightness in some cases

and an entire set of emotions starts to be recruited

that at least for you,

resemble the turning of the seasons from winter to spring.

Now that may sound rather complex,

but we're going to break that process down

into its component parts.

But what I essentially just said

is that when you listen to music,

not only are you hearing that music,

but your body, that is your neurons

and indeed your hormones as well,

things like oxytocin and some other hormones

in your brain and body that we'll discuss,

are contributing to a symphony of emotion

from within your body and brain.

Okay, so while music can't explain objects,

it can't describe them,

it can explain in a very nuanced ways emotions

and it can evoke emotions within us.

Now, if that's not amazing enough,

music can not only describe and evoke emotions,

it can also imply intent.

Think for instance, about drumming

that you would hear off in the distance

and we're not talking about,

we're talking drumming of this sort.

Doom, doom, doom.

And perhaps the cadence of that drumming changes

such that as it's approaching,

it gets more and more frequent.

Doom, doom, doom.

What is the intent being implied?

Well, we know from numerous studies

and you know from numerous movies that you've seen

and heard that that sort of low frequency drumming

of increasing cadence as it approaches

is implying the intent of aggression or war

or at least is implying that something serious

is going to happen.

Now, contrast that with a different frequency of sound

played at a higher cadence.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Now, the second set of tones,

da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

are far less clear in terms of what they mean,

what their intent is,

but if we contrast them with,

let's just call them what they're typically called,

the war drums or the drums that convey a sense

of aggressive intent.

Doom, doom, doom.

What we create then is a juxtaposition

of two different emotional states in you perhaps,

or maybe you don't respond to those

with any robust emotional shift,

but we are conveying two separate

or distinct sets of intent.

Now, of course, spoken language can convey intent.

I could say, for instance, you know, I'm going to help you.

How can I help you today?

Or I could say, I'm gonna hurt you, right?

Of course, with spoken language, you could do that

and you could change the intonation of that language,

you could change the frequency.

So if I were to say, I'm going to hurt you,

it's very different than if I say, I'm gonna hurt you, okay?

Or if I put it as a question, I'm gonna hurt you, okay?

So with language, of course,

there's also the opportunity for a lot of nuance

depending on where the inflections,

where the accents are on a particular phrase,

even a particular word.

But with music, as you recall,

when we convey a sense of intent,

we are also conveying that sense of intent

through the body of the listener,

not just bringing it in through their ears.

And so when we do that, what we do is we start to recruit

a huge number of neural circuits that are involved

not just in understanding or a sense of empathy

for an emotion, but rather that can recruit movement

or what we call premotor circuits in the body.

Premotor circuits are the neurons that start to fire

before a particular pattern of action is generated.

And so when we hear music that conveys emotion,

that evokes emotion, and especially when we hear music

that conveys a sense of intent from the outside,

we too start to feel as if we need to move

or respond to that music in a particular way.

Now, what I just described to you

is not something that's learned.

In fact, it is innate.

How do we know that?

Well, there are some beautiful studies

that have explored how babies respond to music.

Indeed, how babies respond to specific types of music,

specific frequencies of sound,

spacing between particular notes, and on and on.

It's been demonstrated, for instance,

that babies as young as three months old

respond to music very differently than they respond

to just other forms of sound scrambled in time.

Now, of course, babies that are three months old

aren't speaking, so you could ask them,

does that sound like music?

How does it make you feel, et cetera?

They're not going to answer,

at least not with any coherence,

because they don't have spoken language yet,

but despite their absence of language,

we know that babies as young as three months old

respond to music because they do so

with rhythmic movements of their bodily limbs

and actually their torso as well.

Now, a little bit later,

we will touch on this issue of what types of music

evoke movement of the torso versus movement of the limbs

versus movement of the torso and limbs.

No, I'm not going to dance for you during this podcast.

However, there's a really interesting story there

that relates to how primitive or evolved the motor neurons,

the neurons that actually move the musculature are,

and how primitive or evolved the music

that one listens to is.

But just to give you a sense of where that's headed,

in this study where they examined the responses

of very young babies to music,

what they found is that certain frequencies of sound

evoked movements in those babies that were rhythmic,

where it was mostly their torso moving back and forth,

and maybe their head a little bit,

whereas other patterns of sound,

different frequencies in different arrangements,

evoked movement of their limbs more than their torso,

and still other patterns of sounds,

evoked movement of their torso, limbs, and head.

In other words, babies dancing.

And if you've ever been to a wedding or a party

or been out dancing,

you will see people who include more torso versus limb

and torso movement when they dance.

And yes, of course, some of this relates to proficiency

in dancing, comfort on the dance floor, et cetera.

But there are some universal rules out there

about how certain frequencies and patterns of sound,

aka music, evokes different types of bodily movements.

So starting from a very young age,

prior to any instruction in terms of how to dance,

or what music is, babies are dancing to music.

And that highlights an important point

that we will return to again and again

throughout today's episode,

which is that the systems of the brain

that respond specifically to movement,

not just sound, but specifically to musical sounds

are intimately tied to the neural circuits of the body

that generate movement.

And this is especially important to understand

when we get into our discussion

about music and our sense of motivation.

Okay, so the list of incredible things

that music can evoke within us

by way of how it activates our nervous system and body

is starting to grow.

We've talked about how music can convey emotion,

how music can evoke emotion,

and how music can convey a sense of intent,

as well now as how music can generate action within us.

This is a pretty spectacular list if you think about it.

In addition, music causes changes

within our bodily physiology

that extends beyond the nervous system,

although it has a relationship to the nervous system.

In particular, there've been a lot of studies

that have explored how music changes things

like our blood pressure

or how fast our heart is beating

our so-called resting heart rate.

And here we've made some important discoveries

in recent years.

And when I say we, I don't mean my laboratory.

I mean laboratories that focus on the relationship

between music and our bodily physiology

because we've long known that music

can change various health metrics.

There's some really nice studies

and I'll link to one or two of the meta-analyses

of these studies in the show note captions

that have showed that if people listen to anywhere

from 10 to 30 minutes of music per day,

and by the way, the selection of music in these studies

ranged everything from rock and roll

to classical music to country music,

typically these studies would ask subjects

what their favorite music is,

and then they would have them listen

to that particular genre of music

for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per day.

And if you look at the meta-analyses of those studies,

what you find is that almost all of them

see some sort of significant effect.

That is some statistically significant shift

in the bodily physiology of people

that deliberately listen to music

for 10 to 30 minutes per day.

Not while doing anything else,

but just listening to that music.

They find, for instance, that their resting heart rate

is reduced, if not during the period

in which they're listening to the music,

then after the time in which they're listening to the music,

they find that their so-called heart rate variability

tends to increase.

For those of you that aren't familiar

with heart rate variability,

having increased heart rate variability is a good thing,

and that's because heart rate variability

reflects the sort of push and pull

or the balance, rather, of the activation

of the so-called sympathetic nervous system,

which is the one sometimes called the fight or flight system,

although I don't really like that nomenclature.

The sympathetic nervous system,

by the way, is not about emotional sympathy.

It's what drives your heart rate higher.

It tends to put us into activated states

where we favor movement and motion

and makes us alert,

whereas the parasympathetic aspect of our nervous system

is the portion of our autonomic nervous system,

sometimes called the rest and digest system.

The parasympathetic nervous system

drives states of deeper relaxation, of calm.

In any event, heart rate variability

reflects a periodic breaking,

a slowing down of heart rate and breathing,

and other aspects of our neural system function

that works alongside with sympathetic activation.

Think of sympathetic activation as an accelerator,

parasympathetic activation as a break,

and when heart rate variability is higher,

it reflects the fact that our parasympathetic nervous system

is periodically engaging, it's getting activated,

and slowing our heart rate, slowing our breathing down.

Music seems to have the effect

of activating that parasympathetic aspect of our nervous system,

and so we are pumping the break every once in a while,

slowing down our heart rate, slowing down our breathing.

In other words, when people listen to music

for a dedicated period of time each day

of about 10 to 30 minutes,

some studies looked at as much as 60 minutes,

but typically 10 to 30 minutes,

what one finds is that heart rate variability increases

not just during the period

when they're listening to the music,

this is very important,

but also heart rate variability is increased around the clock

in those subjects even during sleep,

making listening to 10 to 30 minutes

of your favorite music each day,

not just what I would think to be a enjoyable protocol,

if you could even call it a protocol,

it's so enjoyable to listen to your favorite music

that it feels almost inappropriate to call it a protocol

because protocol sounds kind of rigid,

like you're imposing that on yourself,

but if you need an excuse to listen to your favorite music

for 10 to 30, maybe 60 minutes per day,

and just attending to that music,

not while doing anything else,

which is what these studies had subjects do,

well, indeed that's been shown

to increase heart rate variability around the clock,

which we know is beneficial for your mental

and physical health more generally.

Okay, so there are dozens, if not hundreds of studies

that have explored how music impacts our physiology,

and as I just mentioned,

it seems that if we listen to music that we like

for 10 to 30, maybe 60 minutes a day,

our physiology, certain health metrics,

heart rate variability in particular, improve.

Now, in light of the positive effects

of listening to music on one's health,

there's a recent meta-analysis

that I found particularly interesting.

The title of this meta-analysis

is Effects of Music on the Cardiovascular System,

and it was published in Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine.

Now, from the title of this paper,

Effects of Music on the Cardiovascular System,

you might think that it's just yet another meta-analysis

exploring how music impacts heart rate variability

and things of that sort.

But what's interesting about this study

is that it identifies that the way

in which listening to one's favorite music

positively impacts the cardiovascular system

and other aspects of our physiology

is very likely not through direct changes

on our heart rate simply by listening to music,

but rather through changes in our breathing.

And this is true even if people

were not singing along with the music, by the way.

Now, the relationship between breathing and heart rate

is something that I've touched on before,

but if you haven't heard me discuss this,

I'm just going to briefly tell you the relationship

in two or three sentences,

and then I'll explain the mechanism

also in about two to three sentences.

So if you have a background in biology

or even if you don't,

this will all be very simple and very clear.

When you deliberately inhale with a lot of vigor

or you deliberately make your inhale longer

than you naturally would.

So for instance, if I breathe in very vigorously

through my nose, something very specific happens

to your heart rate, it increases.

Whereas when you deliberately exhale,

meaning when you exhale and deliberately

make that exhale longer,

or you deliberately add vigor to that exhale,

or even a shorter, deliberate, more vigorous exhale,

you slow down your heart rate.

And that's because of a phenomenon

called respiratory sinus arrhythmia,

which because it includes the word arrhythmia,

sounds like a bad thing, but it's actually a wonderful thing.

It has to do with the relationship

between a particular muscle in your body

called the diaphragm,

which when you inhale, our lungs fill with air,

our diaphragm moves down,

and our heart therefore has a little bit more space.

It actually gets bigger, temporarily bigger, but bigger.

And when it does that,

whatever volume of blood is in the heart

is now moving through a larger space.

So it's the same amount of blood

moving through a larger space,

and the nervous system registers that

as the blood moving more slowly

through that temporarily enlarged heart.

And as a consequence, there's a signal sent

through various stations of the nervous system

to the heart to speed the heart up.

In other words, just as I said before,

when we inhale, our heart rate speeds up.

Conversely, when we exhale, our lungs empty out some air,

our diaphragm moves up, and as a consequence of that,

there's less space for the heart.

And so our heart temporarily becomes smaller.

And when that happens,

the volume of blood within that smaller heart

moves more quickly.

And that's detected by the nervous system,

which then triggers a neural signal

from the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system,

which is just fancy nerd speak

for a neural signal is sent to your heart

every time you exhale to slow your heart down.

So the well-established effects

of listening to your favorite music,

increasing your heart rate variability

is not a direct interaction

between the sounds coming in through your ears

and changes in your heart rate

while you're listening to the music.

That's actually what I would have thought happened,

but this more recent meta-analysis

pulls apart the variables in these different studies.

It really illustrates that when we are listening to music,

we are subconsciously, most of the time subconsciously,

changing our patterns of breathing.

We are inhaling in anticipation

of certain things happening in the music.

We're exhaling when we feel a relief of tension.

We get excited, we may get sad, we may get happy.

We may even just be listening to music

that we don't think is impacting our physiology

at such a core level, but indeed it is.

Music is able to route into our nervous system

at levels below our conscious awareness

and literally turn the various knobs, if you will,

of our cardiovascular system, of our breathing apparatus,

the diaphragm, the lungs.

It can evoke respiratory sinus arrhythmia,

which again, sounds like a terrible thing,

but is actually the reflection

of a healthy nervous system in heart.

And in doing so, yes, it increases heart rate variability,

something that is beneficial to all of us,

but it's doing so by changing our patterns of breathing.

So if you've ever wondered why music can change

how you feel so robustly,

well, it's doing that at a deep foundational level

of your nervous system,

indeed at the levels of your nervous system

that typically are not in your conscious awareness,

because I have to imagine that most of you

are probably not listening to music and thinking,

oh, here comes that one chorus

or here comes that one melody

and this is where I always exhale

or this is where I always hold my breath,

this sort of thing.

No, most people are just listening to music,

it's coming in through their ears,

they're experiencing some bodily sensations,

maybe they're moving their torso, arms,

maybe your arms and torso,

maybe you're not moving at all, no dancing,

maybe just listening within your head

or maybe it's just dropped into the background

below your conscious awareness at all.

And yet that music is communicating emotion,

it's evoking emotion, it's communicating intent,

it's activating those premotor circuits

that would have you move if it could.

And we'll talk about dance a little bit later,

but even if you're not dancing,

even if you're not swaying the tiniest bit,

your patterns of breathing are changing

and through respiratory sinus arrhythmia,

your heart rate is changing

and through changes in your heart rate,

your heart rate variability is increasing.

So if ever you wanted a tool or protocol

that was easy to use but could positively impact

your mental and physical health,

well, listening to your favorite music for 10 to 30,

maybe 60 minutes, maybe more per day is that protocol.

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So hopefully it's becoming clear

just how absolutely powerful music is

at evoking different physiological responses within you

that is within your brain and body.

But there's an additional one

that I find particularly interesting

because it addresses and indeed answers

one of the most common questions that I receive all the time,

which is how can I get more motivated?

Not how I, Andrew can get more motivated,

although of course I ask myself that question

from time to time, although admittedly,

most of the time I'm wondering how I'm just gonna get

everything that I need to get done,

but I often get the question,

how can I feel more motivated?

Or what can I do to sustain my motivation over time?

And we hear a lot of different strategies

about how to do that.

We hear about the quote unquote, just do it strategy,

the incredible slogan that Nike created

and that persists to this day

has become commonplace in culture.

And indeed, the just do it form of advice

can be a good one, but for a lot of people,

just hearing just do it or telling themselves just do it

is not something that can evoke action in them.

Other people will listen to motivational speeches,

they'll look at motivational videos,

they'll read motivational books,

they may even hire coaches.

In other words, people invest a ton of time, energy,

and money into trying to be more motivated.

And indeed, a number of episodes

of the Huberman Lab podcast have focused

on the relationship between say motivation drive

and the neuromodulator dopamine.

We have several episodes about that as well as a toolkit,

all of which are available zero cost at HubermanLab.com.

You can access those easily by putting motivation

into the search function at HubermanLab.com.

All of that will come up time-stamped, et cetera.

But perhaps surprisingly, today's conversation

about music offers us a particularly potent tool

to increase motivation.

And that's because one of the fundamental properties

of listening to music is that it evokes activation

of these premotor and motor circuits

within our brain and body.

That is the neural circuits whose specific job

is to mobilize our body from its current position in state

to a new position in state.

So for those of you that listen to music

while you work out or prior to when you work out,

you are definitely onto something.

For those of you that don't, that's fine too.

What I'm going to describe now

are the specific sets of neural circuits

that listening to music activates.

As I mentioned earlier,

listening to music activates so many circuits

throughout the brain and body

that really one can take a step back

from the scientific literature on this

and say anytime someone has done a study

where human beings listen to music

and people record from a particular brain area,

believe it or not, even from the olfactory system,

from the system and the brain responsible for smell,

there seems to be some significant shift

in terms of the neural firing there

or the release of neural chemicals,

which on the one hand might lead you to conclude

that listening to music is just sort of a non-specific

generalized activator of nervous system function.

It's just kind of like turning all the lights on.

But that's not the case.

Music in fact is activating different neural circuits

differently in time and space

to evoke a whole set of specific reactions

in your brain and body,

but not the least of which is the propensity for you to move.

And this is something that you can leverage

and indeed I'll describe a protocol

by which you can leverage music

in order to greatly increase your state of motivation.

Okay, so this is the portion of today's episode

where we're going to discuss some specific neural circuits.

But I want to assure you that if you're a neurobiologist,

you can understand this.

If you are not a neurobiologist,

in fact, if you took no biology ever in your life,

I'm gonna make it clear and easy for you to understand.

As I mentioned before, when we hear music,

it activates many, many circuits

throughout the brain and body.

When I say circuits, I mean neurons, nerve cells

communicate with one another in sort of chains of reactions.

When I say respond to one another,

what I mean is when neurons are quote unquote activated,

they release chemicals.

Those chemicals are called neurotransmitters,

things like glutamate, GABA.

They're also called neuromodulators,

things like dopamine, serotonin.

The names don't really matter

for sake of today's discussion,

but what those things do is they influence the likelihood

that the next neuron will be active or less active.

Okay, so neurons speak the language, if you will,

of electricity because that's how they evoke

release of these chemicals and chemistry.

They vomit out these chemicals.

Those chemicals then bind to little parking spots

on the next neuron called receptors

and then the next neuron gets activated electrically

and then to the next neuron and next neuron and so on.

It's a chain of electrochemical reactions, okay?

So there's your Neuroscience 101 lesson for today.

When people listen to music,

there is heightened activation

of the so-called frontal cortex,

the area of your brain which is on the surface,

below your skull, but just behind your forehead, more or less.

And that area of your brain is involved

in a lot of different things.

It's involved in understanding context,

what sorts of behaviors and thoughts and actions

are appropriate for a given environment.

By the way, if any of you have ever been in an environment

where everyone was really quiet and you thought,

oh my gosh, what's keeping me from just blurting out

my name right now or saying something totally inappropriate,

your frontal cortex is the one providing the so-called

top-down inhibition on that impulse

to blurt something inappropriate out.

And by the way, your thoughts about that impulse

are perfectly normal.

They actually reflect a heightened sense of normalcy

because it means that your brain is thinking

about how it's not going to do that.

And so therefore you're not going to do that.

Likewise, if you are ever at the edge of a high bridge,

please stay on the safe side of the railing.

But if you think, oh my goodness,

what's keeping me from just jumping off the bridge right now,

what's keeping you from doing that is your frontal cortex.

It's suppressing certain actions in a context-dependent way,

in particular actions that are dangerous to you,

socially, physically, dangerous to others,

socially, physically, et cetera.

Now, the frontal cortex in order to do that

also has an incredible ability to make predictions.

So this is the function of the frontal cortex

that I want to focus on for the moment.

Your frontal cortex is great at doing the

if this, then that type of analysis.

If I say this, everyone will be offended.

Or if I say this, maybe they'll laugh.

Or if I don't say this, I'll be safe.

If I do say that, I won't be safe.

This kind of thing.

Frontal cortex is activated when we listen to music

because within music, there are some regularities.

Sometimes these are described as motifs

or melodies or choruses.

Again, this is the entire landscape of discussion

that we could have and we will have with an expert guest

about how the mathematics of music impacts

the electrochemical signaling within the brain

and the coding that is the mathematics of brain function,

which leads us to predict that certain things

because they just happened are likely to happen again

or not happen again.

But let's set all that aside for the moment

and just state the simple fact,

which is that when you listen to music,

your frontal cortex increases in activation

because it is predicting what you're going to hear next

based on what you're currently hearing

and what you heard before.

Now, I am from the generation that we didn't have iPods

when I was a kid.

We did have CDs, we did have tapes,

but you had to fast forward or rewind a cassette tape

or you had to skip on the CD

in order to move about the album in time.

Nowadays, you can cue up different songs

in different order really easily,

but if you are somebody who listens to albums start to finish

or if you're like me and you grew up listening

to albums start to finish,

maybe occasionally skipping a song,

but you will be very familiar with this phenomenon,

which is that right as a given song ends,

if you're familiar with that album,

you already anticipate the start of the next song

in your head and that just speaks to the predictive function

that the frontal cortex plays.

So if you have a mixed tape with a bunch of different songs,

sure, you don't expect one song of a given artist

to lead into the next,

but if you're somebody who's listened to that mixed tape

a lot, so you're familiar with what song comes next,

or if you're listening to a given album start to finish

and you're very familiar with it,

well, then you'll immediately resonate

with what I'm saying here,

which is that your frontal cortex is always anticipating

what sound is likely to come next.

And this is very important because one of the key things

about music and its ability to evoke our sense of surprise

or delight through the release of a neuromodulator

called dopamine, we'll get to this a bit more later,

is because that prediction machinery is thinking,

oh, I heard that set of chords a moment ago,

I'm going to hear it again.

And then when it changes up, your brain goes,

oh, whoa, hold on, that wasn't what I expected.

And it sometimes does that with a sense of delight,

like, oh, yes.

And sometimes it hears that and goes, oh, wait,

what's this?

I don't really like this that much.

I like the opener of that song,

but I don't really like the rest.

I think of that as, you know, there's certain pastries,

muffins in particular, where I really like the top,

it's got the little crumbs, it's got the berries

and stuff and then you get down past the top

and then you get to the middle and then you're like,

oh, this thing is not that good.

Okay, there's certain songs like that for me,

so I always thought of those as muffin songs

because the top of the muffin is always the best,

whereas a donut is great the whole way through.

And now I'm going on a tangent

because I'm thinking about muffins and donuts.

So I'm going to take us back to music,

but the point is relevant nonetheless,

which is that your frontal cortex is making predictions.

And when those predictions are broken,

that's a sense of novelty.

And when that novelty is something that you like,

okay, so it evokes a sense of, yes, I like that.

Well, then dopamine is deployed.

And when that novelty is something you don't like,

typically there's a reduction in the amount of dopamine

released in a separate set of brain circuits

below whatever level of dopamine happened to be there

prior your so-called baseline level of dopamine.

Okay, so when you listen to music,

there's a strong activation

of the prediction machinery in your brain.

There's also activation of the circuits in your brain

that register novelty.

What are those circuits?

These are things like the ventral tegmental area

and the nucleus accumbens.

I've talked about these before on the podcast.

Again, you don't need to know those names.

Those are the names given to certain brain areas

that control the release of dopamine in time

according to whatever you happen to be experiencing

in that moment.

Okay, so the Mesolympic reward pathway

could perhaps better be called

the Mesolympic reinforcement pathway.

So for those of you out there shouting,

wait, the Mesolympic pathway does a bunch of other things.

It's not just dopamine, I agree.

It's also serotonin, it's a bunch of other things.

But for today's discussion,

we're thinking about the Mesolympic pathway

as deploying dopamine, which it does

when we hear something novel,

meaning not what we predicted and we like what we hear.

And then there are a bunch of other brain centers

and circuits that listening to music activates.

I'll just list off a few.

Again, this isn't intended to confuse anybody

or add a lot of useless nomenclature,

but since I am a neuroscientist

and this is a science and science-informed tools podcast,

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention

that we get strong activation of a brain structure.

You actually have two of them,

one on each side of the brain called the amygdala.

This is a brain area that's part of a larger set of circuits

that's associated with arousal, okay?

Meaning becoming more alert,

becoming more aware of our surroundings

and the particular sensory stimuli

that are coming in at that particular time,

such as the notes of the music

or a particular set of lyrics.

And music also activates areas of the brain

such as the parahippocampal formation,

the cortex and the hippocampus itself,

brain areas that encode and store memories.

And this is something

that I think everyone will be familiar with.

When you hear certain songs or even songs

that sound like certain songs

or even songs that you swear you've never heard before,

it can evoke a sense of nostalgia,

of longing for something, of missing somebody,

of sadness or of delight and happiness.

And positive memories of somebody or something.

Indeed, I think it's fair to say

that hearing particular pieces of music,

particular songs, more than any other experience

can activate a whole library of memory and emotions

within us.

And that's because of its ability

to activate the parahippocampal regions of the brain,

the cortex and the hippocampus itself.

Again, several different brain areas,

all which communicate with one another

and other areas of the brain

in order to encode our memories,

our sense of self, our sense of others,

our sense of history with those people and on and on.

Now, rather than just make this a catalog

of different brain areas that music evokes,

what I'm trying to do is spell out

how music activating these different brain areas

is creating different components

of what we are familiar with as our experience of music.

So frontal cortex prediction,

mesolimbic reward pathway, novelty, amygdala,

the sense of emotion and arousal.

Parahippocampal cortex and cortex and hippocampus,

our memories in particular, our emotional memories

and our location memories

associated with a particular piece of music, right?

Haven't you ever heard a song from,

let's say a summer camp that you went to when you were a kid?

All of a sudden, you're remembering the smell of the grasses

at that summer camp.

You're remembering how some of the kids were really great

and how some of the kids were really obnoxious.

You're remembering some things that you did.

You're remembering your counselors.

I mean, there's just a whole landscape

of neural information there, life information stored

in your head that hearing a particular song

that was sung when you were what, eight years old,

10 years old at camp just flips the lid on

and it comes geysering out, remarkable.

Now there are two other sets of brain circuits

that are activated by music that deserve specific attention

and deserve that specific attention now

in the context of discussing motivation

and music's ability to motivate us in particular ways.

And those brain circuits are the basal ganglia.

Okay, so this is a set of circuits within the brain

that are associated with action initiation,

so-called go circuits and withholding action,

so-called no-go circuits.

But basically the basal ganglia

are involved in regulating movement.

And the cerebellum.

The cerebellum is sometimes referred to as the mini brain.

It looks like a little mini brain

in the bottom back of the human brain.

In some species, the cerebellum is much larger

relative to the rest of the brain,

but in humans it's like this little piece in the back

that looks like a little mini brain.

Like you're carrying a second brain back there,

that's why I call it mini brain, cerebellum.

And it's involved in a lot of things,

but one of its primary functions

is to encode rhythmic timing and processing.

And along with its outputs to some deeper brainstem areas,

things like the vestibular and cochlear nuclei,

we'll talk about this, the parabracial nucleus.

Again, you don't need to know these names.

It, meaning the cerebellum,

along with the basal ganglia,

creates patterns of activity in our brain

that cascade down to particular circuits in our body.

So these are so-called premotor circuits

and motor circuits that generate the sense

that we not only can move,

but that we want to move

and that we want to move in particular ways.

So if you internalize nothing from the last five minutes

or so in which I've been describing

how music impacts different neural circuits in the brain,

please do take away this important point,

which is that when we listen to music,

we think of that as an auditory experience,

but now you know that it's also an emotional experience.

And, and this is a very important and,

when we listen to music,

it is programming a specific set of motor actions

that are more likely to occur.

Put differently, when we listen to music,

we are more likely to move our body

and not just dance, not just move our torso,

our limbs, or our limbs and torso together

in concert with the music,

but rather move our body from its current position

to another position.

And this is one of the most important things

to understand about music.

Music, despite being an auditory stimulus

coming in through our ears,

evokes the activation of neural circuits in our brain

that creates a sort of inertia.

It creates a propensity for action across our entire body.

So now that you understand that listening to music

activates lots of different brain circuits,

of course, the circuits that respond to auditory stimuli,

so called primary auditory cortex,

is powerfully activated by listening to music,

but also circuits associated with novelty, anticipation.

We talked about circuits in the brain associated with memory,

but also circuits in the brain

that are associated with generating movement

and not just movement that is in sync with

or corresponds to the music that we're listening to,

but all forms of movement.

But when we listen to music that has a relatively fast cadence

and we can actually define what that cadence needs to be,

and we'll do that in a moment.

When we do that, so-called premotor circuitry,

the circuitry that's going to initiate that kind of inertia

or that pressure for movement within the neural circuits

that actually evoke movement are all activated.

So for those of you that like to listen to music

while you exercise, you're familiar with the fact

that listening to great songs with a great beat,

with particular lyrics, or that associate you

with a particular time or place in your life

can be very motivating.

But there are data showing that when people listen to music

that's faster than about 140 to 150 beats per minute,

that it creates a heightened state of motivation

in the body to move.

And the way that it does that is by way of shifting

the balance between those go circuits

and no-go circuits of the basal ganglia.

There's some other ways that it does it as well.

For instance, music can evoke the release

of certain neurochemicals called the catecholamines.

These include dopamine, but also norepinephrine

and epinephrine from centers in the brain and body,

glands in the body like the adrenal gland

that shift the body toward a predisposition

of being more likely to move.

So if we want to distill all this out

to a simple actionable takeaway, simply know this.

Listening to music, relatively faster music,

predisposes you to be more motivated to move.

And that is independent.

This is what I find so cool.

It's independent of whether or not you're familiar

with the song, independent of whether or not

the lyrics of the song are motivating lyrics.

If they are, that's just going to layer on top

of the faster cadence, which is going to predispose you

to move, but what's remarkable is that just listening

to that faster cadence music is creating

a neuronal resonance, if you will,

a pattern of neuronal firing within you

that is going to essentially take your,

and here I'm using metaphor,

is going to put your state of motivation

from either back on your heels to being flat-footed

or let's say you're mildly motivated,

so I'll call that flat-footed,

to being forward center of mass.

So for any of you that are suffering

from lack of motivation, in particular to exercise,

but believe it or not, also to do cognitive work

where you're going to be still

and you're going to sit down and you're going to read

or learn or practice something.

Listening to music for 10 to 15 minutes

prior to doing that work, prior to doing that exercise

is one of the best ways to get motivated

in order to engage in that work or engage in that exercise.

That's been demonstrated in the data very conclusively

using a variety of different types of music.

And again, there are multiple mechanisms

that converge to create that heightened state of motivation.

Some of those mechanisms are neurochemical,

like the release of the so-called catecholamine,

dopamine, norepinephrine, and nepinephrine.

Some of them are strictly neural circuit-based,

so activation of premotor circuitry,

and those are going to combine with neural circuits

that are going to narrow your field of vision.

This is a good thing whenever you want to be motivated.

They're going to literally constrict your field of vision

to more of a tunnel type of vision

as opposed to more panoramic vision,

and that I described it as

placing you into a forward center of mass.

I don't necessarily mean literally a forward center of mass,

and thus perhaps you're exercising,

like running, leaning slightly forward.

What I'm talking about is using music as a way

to deliberately shift your state of mind and body

from one that is amotivated, not motivated,

to more motivated.

And it's a very simple protocol

extracted from the peer-reviewed literature.

You simply find some faster music,

hopefully music that you like, it would be even better

if it was music that had lyrics that you find motivating,

and listening to that for 10 to 15 minutes

prior to engaging in whatever that work

may be physical or cognitive.

On the topic of cognitive work,

one of the most common questions I get

is what sorts of sounds or music should I listen to

in order to increase my state of productivity,

motivation, concentration, et cetera.

On previous podcasts related to focus and motivation,

I touched on the use of so-called binaural beats,

which are different frequencies of beats

presented to one or the other ear.

This is best accomplished with headphones,

and there are a lot of different frequencies

of binaural beats that you can get out there.

If you want to get detailed about this,

binaural beats also involve the differential

between the frequency of beats,

between the two presented to the two ears,

and then that difference then is heard

by higher-order processing centers in the brain.

In any event, we don't have to get too technical about it.

We can simply say that, yes,

there are some decent peer-reviewed studies

demonstrating that when people listen to so-called 40 hertz,

particular frequency of sound,

40 hertz binaural beats,

that it can enhance concentration and focus.

However, this is important, there are some recent studies

that show that binaural beats sometimes

can impede concentration and focus,

and thereby can impede cognitive performance

on various tasks.

However, the studies that show that binaural beats

can be detrimental to performance

on various cognitive tasks

did not use 40 hertz binaural beats specifically.

So we are still awaiting more studies on binaural beats.

Meanwhile, I'll just restate what I said before,

is that there is some evidence

that listening to 40 hertz binaural beats

can enhance concentration and focus.

There are also data showing that other frequencies

of binaural beats might be detrimental

to concentration and cognitive performance.

And previously, I've also discussed studies

showing that, for instance,

if people listen to white noise in the background,

you could do this on your computer

or speakers in the room or headphones

or so-called brown noise,

which is essentially like white noise,

all frequencies of sound

or most frequencies of sound combined,

but with particular frequencies of sounds

that are accentuated and others are notched out

as it's called, so-called brown noise.

Rather than understand all of this at a technical level,

because I've covered that before in previous podcasts,

suffice to say, if you go to YouTube

and you just put in white noise background

for cognitive focus

or brown noise background for cognitive focus,

you can just try those if you like during a session

in which you're trying to read or learn

or do mathematics or music

or any kind of cognitive work.

If you don't like them, if they don't work for you,

then there's certainly no obligation to use them.

Likewise with 40 Hertz binaural beats.

And for binaural beats,

you can also find those as zero-cost YouTube scripts

that are a number of zero-cost apps

that will allow you to listen to binaural beats.

I've used the app Brainwave for some period of time now.

To be honest, I've never done this strict control experiment

on myself of listening to the 40 Hertz binaural beats

or not listening to 40 Hertz binaural beats

doing the equivalent types of tasks.

I can be fairly regimented with my work and behavior

but I haven't run a detailed controlled study

on myself around this.

Rather, if I want to heighten my level of focus

or rule out distractions, what I will do

is I will listen to either white noise or brown noise

while I do work

or I will listen to 40 Hertz binaural beats

while I do certain types of work

or sometimes frankly, I just work in silence.

Other times I will listen to classical music in the background.

I'm a big fan of listening to classical piano.

I particularly like Glenn Gould, the Bach variations.

Those are very pleasant to me

but and this is really important

in researching this episode about music in the brain.

What I discovered was in the controlled studies

that have been carried out

as to whether or not people perform better

on cognitive tasks that require a lot of focus

especially learning tasks

that compared silence in the background

to purely instrumental music in the background

to music with lyrics in the background

to one's favorite music with or without lyrics.

The data are very clear.

It's very clear that most people

that means statistically on average

people perform best on cognitive tasks

or tasks that require a lot of focus to perform.

Again, these are mental tasks, not physical tasks

when they are doing those tasks in complete silence.

So that was somewhat surprising to me.

Second best conditions are to do those tasks

in the presence of instrumental music only.

And in that case, there was a lot of variation

as to whether or not people preferred faster cadence music

so 140 to 150 beats per minute or faster

or slower music, 60 beats per minute or slower.

I'll get back to those specific numbers later

because they represent thresholds

for inducing different types of emotional states

either happy or sad.

But meanwhile, it's very clear

when people work in silence

they perform better than when they work

with music instrumentals in the background.

And they perform even less well

when they listen to music with lyrics in the background.

We'll talk about why that is the case in a moment.

And then people perform especially poorly

relative to their performance in silence

or any of the other conditions I mentioned

when they listened to their favorite music

while doing cognitive work.

And that to me was a bit surprising,

especially since I spent a lot of my university years

studying while listening to my favorite music

in different forms that listen to slower music

than faster music and go back and forth.

And then sometimes turn it off altogether

and work in silence.

But the center of mass of the literature around this issue

of whether or not to listen to music

while one studies or tries to learn something,

the data are pretty clear.

The data show that it's best to study

and learn either in silence

or with quiet instrumentals in the background.

Now I mentioned before that previous studies compared

the effects of working in silence

versus working with 40 Hertz binaural beats

or white noise or brown noise in the background.

And in those studies,

it was found that the white noise, brown noise

and 40 Hertz binaural beats background

produced better levels of focus,

I should say heightened levels of focus

and cognitive performance and learning

than working in silence.

But I've not yet seen the study that compared

40 Hertz binaural beats, brown noise, white noise

to music directly.

Perhaps there's one out there, if there is,

please send it to me,

I'd be very curious to learn what the results of those are.

Now that might seem like a lot of information

but the takeaways from it are very clear

and it's always nice when things are clear, right?

It's clear that if we want to focus and learn

that working in silence or with white noise

or brown noise or 40 Hertz binaural beats

is going to be preferable to working

while listening to music.

But if you're going to listen to music while you work,

that is do cognitive work,

then you're going to want to listen to music

that is purely instrumental

and ideally the music would be somewhat faster

than 140 to 150 beats per minute.

Now, I do not expect you to go and measure

the frequency of beats per minute

in the music that you listen to

and of course the beats per minute are going to change,

right?

That's an average 140 to 150 beats per minute.

I don't expect you to get super technical,

break down the music that you're listening to.

That is not my goal

nor is that really what this podcast is about.

I think occasionally people think that,

you know, the goal of a science

and science-based protocols podcast

is to optimize everything.

In fact, I'm not such a fan of the word optimize

because optimal really depends on the situation

that you happen to be in.

The point here is simply this,

that many people out there, including myself,

have been listening to some of our favorite music

while working, but it's very clear

as to why that degrades cognitive performance.

We know, for instance, that when we read,

we are creating a semantic narrative in our own head.

And when we listen to music with lyrics,

especially music with lyrics that we recognize,

the semantic content of the song, the lyrics,

competes with our comprehension of the narrative

within our head from the material

that we're supposed to be learning.

So now it should be sort of obvious

why listening to your favorite music that includes lyrics

while trying to learn something else

is going to impede learning.

It's because you've got multiple scripts,

multiple dialogues happening in your head.

And in fact, this is an opportunity for me

to take a slight tangent, but a relevant one,

which is to say a lot of times people will ask me

how I can retain a lot of information.

I confess I never use a teleprompter for podcasting.

I do have usually a short stack of notes,

anywhere from one to six or seven pages

of just bullet-pointed notes that queue up things

that I want to talk about

and that I have researched in the literature.

And then of course I'll refer to papers from time to time.

But one of the things that's been very useful for me,

which was taught to me by the way by a professor

when I was in university,

to read and retain information that I've read by memory

is that when I read,

I'm trying to listen to the words being spoken in my head.

Typically in my own voice,

although sometimes in someone else's voice,

doesn't really matter, I find.

So when I'm reading,

yes, it's a process of visual scanning,

but I'm also listening to the words within my head

as if they're being spoken.

Some of you may be familiar with this

because you do it, others of you perhaps

might find this a bit more foreign.

I'd be curious to know what your process of reading

and retaining that information is,

whether or not it includes an internal dialogue.

But nonetheless, it should be very straightforward now

to see why if you're listening to words

that you're reading on a page,

maybe even mumbling them a little bit,

moving your lips a little bit while you read,

which by the way,

if you heard our episode on language

and auditory processing with Dr. Eddie Chang,

who's chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,

he talked about the fact that when we read any material

that the brain is generating premotor activity,

you now know what premotor activity is,

premotor activity down to the muscles of the throat,

larynx and spherinx,

which would speak those words,

were those signals to get above a certain level,

but that when we read typically the signals

that are getting sent through those premotor circuits

are just below the threshold

of what would have us actually speak those words.

Put simply, when we read,

we are just shy of saying what we are reading.

And so when I say that when I read,

I'm listening to the words in my head,

that's what I'm referring to.

So we're starting to funnel in on some general principles

of music and how it impacts the brain

and how that can be leveraged toward better learning

and better motivation,

both in the context of physical and cognitive endeavors.

Okay, so if you want to get motivated listening to music

prior to doing something that you're trying to motivate to do

is a good idea.

That's what the data say.

If you're trying to learn something that's cognitive,

then requires reading, focus and concentration,

silence, 40 Hertz binaural beats,

white noise or brown noise is probably best.

And if you are going to listen to music,

listening to music that includes instrumentals,

but not lyrics would be best.

And listening to music that includes lyrics

that you're very familiar with

would be the worst condition.

Now, with that said, there are nice studies.

And by the way, I'm going to link to a number of reviews

and primary studies in the show note captions

that refer back to this point I'm about to tell you,

which is that listening to music while trying to do

cognitive tasks can be detrimental

toward learning that material.

Turns out that if you listen to music in the breaks

between trying to learn certain material,

you can actually heighten your level of cognition

and focus in your ability to learn.

So I find this particularly cool.

It's not that music is bad for focus

and cognition and learning.

It's that listening to music,

especially music that you're familiar with

that includes lyrics at the same time

as trying to learn something else is not a good idea.

But listening to music with lyrics,

especially music with lyrics that you're familiar with

that you find particularly uplifting and motivating

is a cognitive and performance enhancer

when you go back to doing that work in silence

or perhaps while listening to white noise,

brown noise or 40 Hertz by Noro Beats.

So like so many things, the answer is not black and white.

It's not that silence is better than music

or that music is bad for learning.

It turns out that listening to music,

even music with lyrics you're very familiar with

can be highly beneficial for learning,

but that you want to listen to that music in the breaks

between these bouts of cognitive work.

Now, I've done previous podcasts that talk about

how long a bout of cognitive work can or should be.

Typically 90 minutes is going to be the upper limit

before you take a break.

Some people can't work for 90 minutes without a break.

And by the way, folks, when I say without a break,

I don't mean remaining in a deep trench of focus

for 90 minutes, nobody does that.

Actually, I suppose there are a few folks

that with neurochemical assistance

or just by way of training can get themselves

into a deep, deep trench of focus for 90 minutes or more,

but most people are going to focus on something

and then have their attention flip out of focus

and then they're going to have to draw their focus

back to whatever it is they're doing.

That's not just typical, that's absolutely normal

and you shouldn't be concerned at all

if you try and focus for three minutes

and find your attention jumping around

two or three times during that attempt.

But if you're somebody who is going to do say a 90 minute

or even 60 minute or even 30 minute bout of work

and you are going to get up for a moment

and use the restroom or you're going to take a break

in between bouts of work.

So maybe you work for 30 minutes, take 10 minutes

or five minutes off or 90 minutes, take 30 minutes off,

listening to music in those breaks,

it seems can increase our ability to focus

and to learn new material once we return

to those bouts of cognitive focus.

Now, when it comes to physical exertion,

cardiovascular exercise, resistance training of any kind,

many people including myself like to listen to music

while performing that physical exercise

or that physical exertion.

The data on whether or not music

improve physical performance is a bit mixed.

Certainly you can find studies that show

that it improves physical output.

Other studies will say that it doesn't make a difference.

Other studies will say that it reduces physical output.

However, this is a very important,

however, the type of physical exercise

is not very well matched between those different studies.

So this is something that I believe

is going to be highly individual.

In accordance with the published data, I mix it up.

There are times when I will head out for a run

or I will do a resistance training session

and I will listen to music,

usually an album all the way through

or a playlist all the way through.

And that's because I don't want to be going

onto my phone very often.

In fact, these days I use an older separate phone

that doesn't have any text messaging

or communication to the outside world,

but it has music loaded into it or onto it.

That allows me to just listen to music

so that I don't run the risk of getting distracted,

texting and doing things like that.

I just want to focus on my physical exercise.

I should say that phone also has audio books,

podcasts, things I've downloaded to it.

So it's a place where I can listen to things

but not communicate with the outside world

at least while exercising.

Some people do very well to listen to music,

literally in between and during their sets

of resistance training throughout their entire runs.

It's going to be individual.

You have to figure out what's best for you.

However, one of the most interesting things

about the scientific literature on this

shows that if people listen to music,

in particular music that tends to be faster, more upbeat,

typically it's going to be in these studies,

rock and roll music as opposed to classical,

although there are some studies that have explored

classical and other forms of music

as it relates to exercise.

Listening to that music in between bouts of exertion,

so in the rest between sets of resistance training

or periodically during say a run or a bout of cycling

can indeed enhance performance in a way

that at least by my read of the data

exceeds that which is observed

when people just listen to music throughout.

In other words, if you find it useful to listen to music

before, during and after your workouts, great, be my guest.

However, what the data say is that switching up

between silence and listening to music,

and in this case it would be listening to music

that you're very familiar with

and that can evoke a sense of motivation

and desired action in you for whatever reason,

the music, the beat, the memories that it draws you to,

et cetera, well then that's going to be useful.

So there really isn't one protocol

for how to get the most out of music

for sake of physical exertion,

but if you're interested in playing

with some of these variables

as they've been examined within the peer reviewed literature,

I find it interesting and indeed I found it useful

to for instance, do a workout where I only listen to music

in between sets of resistance training

or to listen to music prior to going out for a run.

And then oftentimes when I do that,

the song or songs will be sort of on loop in my head,

although I confess that a lot of times nowadays

I listen to podcasts while I run or while I hike

and when I'm in the gym and I'm doing resistance training,

I like to listen to music as opposed to content

that requires that I really focus very heavily

on that content, such as a podcast, such as a book.

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Now I'd like to talk about the use of music

to shift our mood and indeed to get us

out of states of anxiety.

This is a really interesting scientific literature

with some very specific actionable takeaways

that I think everyone will find beneficial.

I certainly did.

However, I wanna point out that we don't need

a scientific study to illustrate for us

the way that music can shift our mood.

And you already know why it is that listening

to a sad song can sometimes make us feel sad.

Listening to happy music can make us feel happy.

It's because when we listen to music,

there are some fundamental components of that music,

literally the mathematical structure of that music,

including the frequency of sounds,

the cadence of those sounds, as well as the lyrics,

but even in the absence of lyrics

that are activating brain circuits within us

such that the frequencies of sound that we're hearing

are evoking firing of neurons in the brain

of the same frequency.

In other words, your brain becomes a bit of a piano

playing the same song that you're hearing inside your head.

Now that's sort of a duh, right?

You hear music in your head,

even if you're listening to it from outside in the room,

but when you understand that neurons speak the language

of electrochemical communication,

what we're talking about here is particular music

evoking the release of neurochemicals in your brain

at a particular frequency.

So just think about that for a second.

We know that neurochemicals such as dopamine, serotonin,

some of the so-called endogenous opioids, right?

These aren't opioids that people take.

This isn't related to the opioid crisis.

We're talking about endogenous opioids

that are released in response to music, things like exercise,

different types of social interactions.

Those and other chemicals are released

according to the firing of specific neurons.

And we know that when you listen to music

at particular frequencies arranged in particular motifs,

et cetera, that the neurons that release those neurochemicals

are firing at those same frequencies.

In other words, that the sound is causing a sound dependent

pharmacologic concert within your brain.

So that fact should make it incredibly clear

as to why certain music, even in the absence of lyrics,

can evoke certain emotional states.

Certain sound frequencies are transformed

into the neural language within your brain

that releases certain neurochemicals

that create certain emotional states of brain and body.

Just to drill in how incredible that really is

a little bit further, if you see a beautiful painting

or the picture or presence of somebody's face in real life

that evokes a particularly strong positive

or negative emotion, you can imagine that of course

it creates the release of certain neurochemicals

or perhaps in the case of a negative face,

suppresses the release of certain neurochemicals.

But we can't say that a particular frequency of color,

say reds against oranges or the presence of a rainbow

evokes a sort of rainbow-like cascade of neurochemicals.

Whereas with sound, that's exactly what's happening.

And this isn't to diminish the value of vision

in terms of its ability to evoke emotional states within us.

After all, I'm foremost a neuroscientist

but under the umbrella of neuroscientists,

I started off as and I continue to be a vision neuroscientist

studying the visual system

and its ability to evoke emotional states within us.

But I have to acknowledge that the auditory system

and in particular the circuits in the brain

that respond to music have a remarkably potent ability

to evoke these emotional states,

which is why when surveys have been done

asking people why they listen to music,

the responses that have come back

generally resemble the following statistics.

Approximately 90% of people say

they listen to music to relax.

Approximately 82% of people self-report

that they listen to music in order to make themselves happy.

Approximately 46.5% of people say

that they listen to music in order to process

particular states of emotion.

We'll get back to what process means in a moment,

but more often than not,

when the studies have asked specific questions

about what particular types of emotions people are listening

to in order to process their emotions better,

it is the emotion of sadness.

And 32.5% of people report

that they listened to music in order

to increase their sense of concentration.

And we already talked about the role of music

in concentration or its ability,

in some cases to inhibit concentration a few minutes ago.

Now, you might be asking yourself,

how can 90% of people listen to music for one thing

and 82% of people for another thing and so on and so forth

were well over 100% of people?

Well, in this survey and other surveys like it,

people had the option to give multiple reasons

for listening to music,

because of course most people have multiple reasons

for listening to music.

Now, with that said,

if we are to examine this one particular category,

nearly half of people who report listening to music

on a regular basis,

listen to music in order to process their emotions,

we can ask what does the scientific literature

tell us about how certain types of music

evoke certain types of emotions

or help us process certain emotions?

Again, we'll get back to what we mean by process in a moment,

but a number of studies have been done on this.

There's some meta-analyses that converge

on some general themes,

what I refer to as the center of mass of data, right?

When there are a lot of studies in a given area,

the outcomes of some of those studies conflict

with one another, generally in a good meta-analysis,

what happens is different studies

are considered more powerful or less powerful than others,

depending on how many subjects were involved,

the different control conditions

or lack of control conditions and so on and so forth.

This is one of the great values of meta-analyses.

Is that they don't treat all studies equally.

They separate out studies based on their level

of rigor and thoroughness.

Well, what we can say with confidence is that music

that makes us quote unquote happy

or tends to shift people's state from less happy to happier

regardless of how they entered the experiment

tends to be faster music,

meaning music that on average contains 140 to 150 beats

per minute or faster, okay?

And there's some other features to quote unquote

happy music, if you will,

that it tends to be in a major key

that if there are lyrics to that music

that the lyrics tend to report things that are happy

or get this total nonsense.

In fact, when the type of lyrics in this quote unquote

happy music is I guess singing about great events in life

and positive things falling in love, being in love,

positive memories, birth of children,

connection to friends, great adventures.

Those lyrics where I should say

that music containing those lyrics

was no more effective in creating states of happiness

than was music of equivalent cadence.

So again, music that was 140 to 150 beats per minute

or faster on average.

Well, even if the lyrics were complete nonsense,

even if the vocalizations weren't actual words,

it still evoked the same increase

in the level of happiness in the subjects

than when compared to the music containing

coherent lyrics around happy events.

What this means is that the cadence of music

is no doubt the critical variable

when one is trying to shift one's mood

from a state of whatever could be depressed or sad

to non-depressed, non-sad or neutral to positive

and so on and so forth.

But what this also explains is one hit wonders.

Rarely, if ever, by the way,

are one hit wonders sad and depressing songs.

Sometimes almost always these one hit wonders

are songs that are very effective

in shifting people's mood from not so happy to happier

or we could just say happier regardless of where they started

out before listening to the song.

They feel better while and after listening to the song.

And indeed more often than not,

the lyrical content of those songs

is not particularly meaningful.

It's not addressing a particularly meaningful state

or issue is just what some people call a party song

or it's something that's just uplifting,

not just to them, but to many other people,

which actually brings up an interesting

and future-looking point, which is that nowadays

we are seeing the emergence of AI,

artificial intelligence being used to generate new songs

by capturing these well-established rules

gleaned from neuroscience of how music impacts the brain

such that in the future, artificial intelligence

is going to be generating hit songs for us

as opposed to having people generating hit songs.

I know this evokes a state of concern and fear

in many people.

I think that this is a fear that needs to be matched

with, I don't know, perhaps a cautious optimism.

I mean, who knows, maybe there are patterns of music

including lyrics that human beings

in their current understanding of themselves

and of music have not yet been able to tap into.

And who knows, maybe AI will be generating the best music

that we've ever heard or perhaps music

that can shift our states from more depressed or sad

to heightened levels of happiness

in ways that humans have just not been able to accomplish.

So I think it's important to balance any pessimism

about AI and its ability to generate music

based on these rules of how music impacts the brain

with an open-mindedness.

After all, neuroscience, neuroimaging

and neural recordings directly with electrodes in the brain

while people are listening to music

is teaching us how the brain responds to that music

and is giving us information that indeed human beings

but also computers can use in order to generate

stimuli music that can shift our brain

into more positive states.

And if that's the case, wouldn't that be wonderful?

Another established feature of happy music is get this,

its ability to get people to relax the furrow of their brow

indeed to raise their eyebrows and to be a bit wide-eyed

and not just through autonomic arousal

but rather through activation of the muscles in the face.

Conversely, we know that sad music

and here we can define sad music.

This has actually been done in the literature.

Sad music tends to be slower than average,

slower than 60 beats per minute or so, again, on average.

And this again is independent of the lyrics

that might not even be present in the song.

Sad music tends to activate the corrugator muscles

of the forehead, which are the muscles

that furrow the brow and that lead to a kind of serious look.

It's a folding in of the face as opposed to a widening up

of the eyes and a relaxation of the brow.

Now, given where we are in the course of this discussion,

that shouldn't be surprising.

We already talked about how listening to particular sounds

evokes the release of particular neurochemicals

but in a more direct fashion, listening to particular sounds

activates certain premotor and motor circuits

within the brain and body,

not just the desire to move one's torso, limbs or both,

bob one's head or move a head side to side,

but also the micro structures of the face,

which because one of the main roles of the face

is to communicate emotion is going to cause

either a relaxation of the brow

and a lifting of the eyebrows or a furrowing

or a activation of the corrugator muscles of the eyebrow.

And if that's not obvious and yet interesting enough,

well, get this, there seems to be a direct relationship.

I'm chuckling because this still just blows my mind

because it's a total duh obvious when you hear it,

but it's still just so cool

that there's a direct relationship of the frequency

of the sound that you hear,

either low pitched or high pitched

and the cadence of that sound.

And here I realized I'm not using technical music theory

language, but whether or not that particular tone

is played over and over close in time

or more spaced out in time and facial expressions

and indeed when we listen to bass tones,

low frequency tones set apart from one another

with some distance so that they're not overlapping,

we get the all too familiar bass face.

So what I'm referring to here

is what neuroscientists would call a labeled line,

literally a circuit of neurons that goes from the periphery,

in this case, our ears into our brain

through several different stations

and then wicks out to impact all sorts of things

within us, states of emotion,

states of motivation, our propensity to move,

but also a labeled line circuit

coming from hearing low frequency sounds

played spaced apart from one another

that evokes a particular facial expression.

And again, this takes us back

to the earlier statement that I made,

which is not an original statement, frankly.

There are people within the field of auditory processing

and understanding how the brain processes music.

In fact, one of the world experts in this,

Dr. Eric Jarvis at the Rockefeller University

was a guest on this podcast

where we talked about the relationship

between music movement and singing

and the fact that music movement in particular dance

and singing likely preceded the evolution

of modern spoken language.

Well, Eric Jarvis and others have argued quite convincingly

that these circuits that I'm calling labeled lines

to particular facial expressions and states of emotion

are the most fundamental components of communication

and the ways that humans have communicated

about their emotional state

and literally induced that same emotional state

in other members of our species

dating back tens of thousands, if not more years.

One of the fun things about researching this episode

on music in the brain

is that there are a lot of quality studies

exploring how music impacts the brain,

neuroimaging, neural recording data

from excellent laboratories, as well as a lot of studies.

In fact, a surprising number of studies

exploring how particular types of music impacts mood states.

And fortunately, that allowed me

to glean some very specific recommendations

as to the minimum amounts of say happy music

that you need to listen to in order to shift your mood

into a happier state.

And indeed, the numbers exist in the literature

and it has been shown that the threshold

for significantly shifting one's mood

into a happier state by listening to the sorts of music

we talked about before, that faster cadence music

even with nonsense lyrics, although it could include

other lyrics, instead is nine minutes.

Not 10, not eight, but nine.

And I'm sort of joking when I say not 10, not eight,

but nine, because of course you could listen to music

for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or longer.

In fact, earlier we talked about the benefits of doing that.

But when one examines the various studies

that looked at how long subjects need to listen to music

in order to shift their mood into a happier state,

the threshold seems to be nine minutes.

So if you want to feel happier than you currently feel,

it seems that listening to happy music for nine minutes

or more is going to be the effective approach.

Okay, so nine minutes or more to shift one state to happier.

What about to process somber or sad feelings,

feelings of loss?

Well, this raises an even bigger question.

And it's a question that I also get very often.

You're noticing I get a lot of questions often.

In any event, one of the common questions that I get is

when we are feeling sad or experiencing a loss,

grieving the loss of a relationship by death or decision

or by somebody moving away or the loss of a pet, et cetera,

is it better to go into that state?

In other words, to quote unquote feel one's feelings

or to counter those feelings?

Now historically, that's been a very difficult question

for me to answer because who am I to say

whether or not you should feel your feelings

or whether or not feeling those feelings

will take you down a trench of feeling much worse

or much better.

In fact, there's an emerging literature

exactly about that issue.

That is whether or not the catharsis model

is really best catharsis being the expression

and feeling of one's emotions as a way to extrude

or get rid of those emotions

or whether or not that simply drives us further down

the trench of those emotions.

That's really something that we should address

in a separate podcast episode.

And I will have experts from the fields of psychiatry

and psychology to help us address that question directly.

But since we're talking about music in the brain

and the fact that music has a tremendous capacity

to evoke emotional states, including sad states,

what has been shown in the peer reviewed literature

is that when people who are feeling sad

for whatever reason, loss of relationship, death,

who knows, doesn't really matter why they're feeling sad

after all, it's that they're feeling sad.

Listening to 13 minutes or more of sad music,

that music can contain lyrics they are familiar with

or no lyrics, regardless of whether or not it contains

lyrics, it's going to be on average 50 or 60 beats

per minute or less, we established that already.

Listening to that for 13 minutes or more has been shown

to be effective in allowing people to quote unquote,

process their somber feelings and to some extent

to move past their feelings of sadness.

So those studies support the idea that when feeling sad,

feeling one's feelings and perhaps even amplifying

those feelings of sadness by listening to sad music

for 13 minutes or more can help people

process those sad feelings.

And while that point might seem overly reductionist,

I actually think it's of real value.

I'm certainly familiar with feelings of loss,

feelings of grief.

And I've often struggled with this question of,

gosh, do I try and just push it aside

or do I deal with those feelings?

Again, this is something that you really need

to determine for yourself, but what these studies show

pretty conclusively is that when we're feeling sad,

matching that sadness or amplifying that sadness

by listening to sad music for 13 minutes or more

can help us move through that state of sadness.

And one could argue this is more or less the use

of catharsis of amplifying emotional expression

or feeling in order to try and move that feeling out.

It was a classic idea for originating

in Freudian psychology, but probably before then as well.

But in any event, I think these data support the idea

that even when feeling sad, perhaps especially

when feeling sad, amplifying or matching those feelings

through the use of sad music for 13 minutes or more.

Again, you don't need to set a timer for 13 minutes,

but giving yourself a period of time

to just listen to that music is one way

that can help you move through that state of sadness

and then be able to lean back into other areas of life.

So we've talked about the role of music

in evoking or shifting states of happiness and sadness.

There are also interesting data that support the use of music

for shifting one out of a state of heightened anxiety.

And I find this especially interesting

because my laboratory for a long time has worked on

behavioral interventions to reduce anxiety,

things like the physiological sigh,

which if you're not familiar with,

you can put physiological sigh in my last name into YouTube

and there's a demonstration of that.

It's a breathing technique of two inhales through the nose

and a long exhale through the mouth to lungs empty

that at this point in time, we understand to be the fastest

and most effective way to reduce one's levels of anxiety

in real time.

So it's two inhales through the nose,

long to lungs empty, exhale through the mouth.

That's the physiological sigh.

Earlier we talked about the fact that one of the main ways

in which listening to music shifts heart rate

and increases heart rate variability

and thereby positively shifts a number

of different health metrics is through shifts in breathing.

So I justify that brief vignette about the physiological sigh

as within the general context

of what we're talking about today.

In any event, there are data that have explored

whether or not specific musical stimuli

can be used to significantly reduce anxiety.

In particular, one published out of the University

of Pennsylvania and I'll provide a link

to this study in the show note captions,

which shows that people that listen to a particular song

that I'll describe in a moment,

experience up to 65% reductions in their anxiety.

That's a significant reduction in anxiety.

And I should point out that 65% reduction in anxiety,

in this case, was accomplished with just three minutes

of listening to this one particular song.

And get this, that particular song was as effective

in reducing anxiety as one of the most commonly prescribed

benzodiazepines.

So what is this magical anxiety reducing song?

The title of the song is Waitless by Marconi Union.

I hadn't heard of this song prior to researching this episode.

I did indeed look up the song on YouTube

and listened to the song.

I will provide a link to the song in the show note captions.

I confess that it is a very relaxing song.

I also confess that I was not experiencing anxiety

when I listened to the song,

but it was successful in reducing my level

of overall autonomic arousal.

I found myself more relaxed, et cetera.

Now, of course, what I'm describing

in terms of my own experience is not a peer reviewed study.

It's what I would call anic data,

meaning I'm just describing my experience.

But again, there are peer reviewed studies exploring

how this particular song shifts one's autonomic state.

And I think this three minutes of listening to this one song

should at least be tried by anyone

that's trying to reduce their anxiety.

Because unless you're listening to the song

in some way that I'm not aware of,

like excessively loud or something of that sort,

I can't imagine how listening to the song

would be detrimental in any way.

And if you are anything like the subjects in the study

that they explored, it could very well be beneficial

and help you reduce your anxiety.

It's also something that you could keep queued up

in your phone or on any device,

such that if you think you may experience anxiety,

you just put your headphones in and listen to it.

You might be wondering whether or not

Marconi Union's waitlist is only three minutes long.

Well, I don't know the answer to that

because when you go on YouTube,

what you'll see is that clearly a number of people

are benefiting from listening to the song

to reduce their anxiety,

or at least that a number of people have listened

to this song because if you put Marconi Union waitlist

into the search function on YouTube,

what you'll quickly discover is that the top video

has get this 47 million views and it's 10 hours long.

Now across today's episode,

it's been in the back of my mind

that some of you out there perhaps are trained musicians

that you grew up playing an instrument,

perhaps sang, inquire or at school,

perhaps you played multiple instruments,

perhaps you even know music theory.

Whereas others, such as myself,

we're encouraged to play an instrument when we were younger

but then abandoned that instrument.

In fact, I'll just tell you a brief story.

When I was a kid, every kid in school was required

to pick an instrument.

My parents, for whatever reason,

clearly they didn't ask me what I wanted to do.

They asked me to play the violin in school

and I got the violin, I started playing the violin.

I took the Suzuki Method lessons.

This is where you don't learn to read music directly.

There's a number assignment to the different notes

and that's initially how you learn.

I was also supposed to listen to the songs while I slept,

this idea that some of the music and musical learning

could be encoded during sleep.

An interesting topic

because there's actually some emerging evidence

for that now, but at the time,

as far as I know, there were no peer reviewed studies

but nonetheless, it was thought that this works

and perhaps it does.

Well, I can tell you one thing for sure,

it did not work for me

because I have one photo and truly just one

from a concert that I played.

I must have been about eight or nine years old

and within this photo, what you'll notice

is there's a gallery of children all with violins,

all of whom's bows are up and my bow is down.

That in addition to the fact

that my fly was open in the picture

and the fact that every time I played the violin,

either by practice or with the teacher present

when we would go to these once a week sessions

with a individual teacher,

people would cringe, animals would cringe,

literally dogs would howl such that my parents

did not encourage me to continue playing.

In fact, they and many others encouraged me to quit playing.

So I quit playing.

I confess I don't know how to play any instrument.

I've attempted a few other instruments in my lifetime.

Yes, I believe in neuroplasticity.

It is a hallmark feature of our brain.

Our brain can learn things even as adults

but the point I've tried to make here

is that I am not of the category of kids

that played an instrument and understands music theory

or how to read music.

I simply don't.

And I realized that those of you that are listening to this

or watching this out there are probably

in a mixed category of proficiency

all the way down to what I would consider

my own relationship to music, which is deficiency.

Although I greatly enjoy listening to music

and I do have a pretty good ability to memorize lyrics

in any event.

The reason I raise this is that there are now dozens

if not hundreds of quality peer reviewed studies

using a variety of technical approaches

that show that when children, especially children

younger than eight, learn to play an instrument

and even better learn to play multiple instruments

regardless of whether or not they learn to read music

that it leads to greatly enhanced connectivity

within their brain that persists into adulthood

and that it facilitates other forms

of neuroplasticity and learning,

which is basically to say that my brain very likely

does not include these enhanced circuits.

Which circuits am I referring to?

Well, there are a number of different circuits

in the brain that have been shown to expand

when children learn how to play an instrument as a child,

eight or younger.

And again, eight isn't a strict cutoff

and I always have to highlight this, forgive the tangent,

but when we say eight or younger,

I don't want people with nine-year-old children

or a 10-year-old kid or even 16-year-old kid listening

or even adult listening to think,

oh, you know, the window is shut for me

because when one designs a study,

you have to have some thresholds of who you include

and who you don't include.

And sometimes that leads to these kind of

artificial perceptions about where the cutoffs are.

But in any event, it's very clear

that if you did learn an instrument when you were young

or ideally even multiple instruments

and even better would be to learn multiple instruments

and how to sing along with instrumentals,

especially in an improvised manner.

Well, your brain has expanded connectivity

on average relative to children

that did not have that experience.

Now, the good news is that learning how to play an instrument

or even, thankfully for me,

listening to novel forms of music,

music that you don't typically listen to

for 30 to 60 minutes per day,

and it doesn't have to be every day, in fact,

it can even be just three days a week for 30 to 60 minutes,

has been shown to expand brain connectivity

in ways that, of course,

lends itself to better musical comprehension

and even performance,

but learning how to play a musical instrument at any age,

as well as singing and singing,

especially with others in a group,

has been shown to enhance learning

and the acquisition of new skills

separate from musical learning and singing.

In other words, it seems that learning how to play

an instrument and singing are a gateway to neuroplasticity.

And this is, again, supported by neuroimaging data.

Some of the more striking of those data

are that children that learned how to play

one to three instruments when they were a kid

or that sang in a choir or a group

or that were taught to sing solo for that matter

show up to 30% greater connectivity

within this particular brain network

that links the two hemispheres of the brain.

Now, as soon as I say two hemispheres of the brain,

it starts drawing up a lot of ideas in people's heads,

mainly derived from pop psychology,

that there are left-brained people and right-brained people.

I've touched on this before,

but I want to make this abundantly clear again now.

Most of what you've heard about so-called left-brained people

or right-brained people is complete and total nonsense.

It's myth.

There are some functions in the brain

that are lateralized to the left or the right hemisphere,

in particular, prosody.

They sort of lilting and falling of speech

and in singing is highly lateralized in the brain.

Other aspects of language can be lateralized in the brain,

but really, if you hear that certain people

are more emotional or certain people are more logical

based on right-brained, left-brained stuff,

that stuff is completely false.

It's complete garbage, in fact.

It's not based in any real solid data.

So when I say that learning an instrument

or learning how to sing young or even as an adult

is beneficial for increasing the connectivity

between the two sides of the brain,

what that increased connectivity

between the two sides of the brain,

which is, by the way, mediated through a structure

called the corpus callosum,

is not about enhancing one's emotional capacity

or logical capacity.

It's really about increasing the capacity

of all brain circuits, or at least the brain circuits

that are connected up directly with the corpus callosum,

which includes many brain circuits

for things like cognition, language learning,

speech, mathematics, a lot of people don't realize this,

but a lot of musicians are also especially adept

at mathematics, and for you musicians,

you're probably nodding, of course, right?

Because music is grounded in theory

that has basis in math and in physics,

something that we will address in a future episode

about harmonics, et cetera.

When children or adults learn how to play

a musical instrument or several,

or how to sing and play musical instruments,

that increased connectivity in the corpus callosum

is essentially providing multiple highways of option

for learning all sorts of things.

So it's something that I highly encourage,

so much so that I intend to finally, finally,

learn how to play an instrument.

I've got a particular instrument in mind

that I've wanted to learn how to play for a very long time,

but based on my prior experience

with trying to learn an instrument,

and because I like to consider myself a considerate person,

I intend to do this more or less in isolation from people

and indeed from animals as well.

And for those of you that don't have the time

or energy or desire to learn new forms of music,

you'll be perhaps delighted to know

that just listening to novel forms of music,

and in particular, when you listen to novel forms of music

and you pay attention to that music,

not just letting it play in the background,

that too has been demonstrated

to expand the brain's capacity for neuroplasticity,

its ability to modify itself and make it better

at learning other sorts of things,

both cognitive and physical.

So I highly encourage you to listen to the music you love.

I certainly love to listen to the music

that I delight in and have for so many years,

but there's also strong scientific support

to encourage listening to new forms of music

that hopefully you will like,

but nonetheless, the mere foraging for

and listening to novel forms of music itself

seems to activate brain circuitry in a way

that allows for better learning and comprehension

of all sorts of things.

So today we've been talking about music in the brain,

and I confess this is an enormous topic,

so much so that I had to discard with entire sets of data

and discussion around, for instance,

the mathematical structure of music

and how that relates to the mathematical structure

of firing of neurons.

We touched on this a little bit, however,

in the context of certain frequencies of sounds

that we hear, creating certain frequencies

of neuronal firing and activation in the brain.

I mean, just think about that, how amazing that is.

It's literally like the brain playing your neurons

like a piano.

This is not what happens when you smell a particular odor

or taste a particular taste

or see a particular face or visual stimulus.

Incredible things happen within those senses as well,

but there is something oh so fundamental and incredible

about music and its ability to tap into our neural circuitry

and our neural chemistry in ways

that shift our emotional states and our motivational states.

So we talked about ways that music can be leveraged

to shift our emotional and motivational states.

Again, not as a way to reduce music

to its reductionist parts,

but rather to help us gain understanding

into how the brain responds to music

and how we can leverage music of all kinds

with and without lyrics,

how we can balance the contrast between music and silence

to increase motivation and so on and so on.

For those of you that are interested

in the more formal structure of music

and how it relates to brain function and vice versa,

as well as for those of you that are interested

in singing and songwriting

and more along the lines of lyrical content

and how singing in groups

and how improvisation of singing and musical playing

can impact brain function and plasticity.

I promise you there's going to be both an expert guest

coming on the podcast to discuss that

as well as a solo episode on those topics.

Again, the topic of music and the brain

being far too vast to cover in just one conversation.

With that said,

I hope that today's discussion allowed for you

to think about music differently.

Hopefully it will lead you to listen to music a bit differently,

perhaps even leverage music for different purposes

in your life and above all to think about music

and to enjoy music,

either listening to it or playing it or both,

because as you now know,

music isn't just able to activate your brain,

but rather your brain contains vast amounts of real estate

that are literally there to listen to music.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Music, Brain, Emotional processing, Plasticity, Productivity, Movement, Motivation, Body, Breathing, Heart rate

People

Dr. Carl Deiseroth, Dr. Eddie Chang, Dr. Eric Jarvis, Marconi Union

Organizations and Institutions

University of Pennsylvania

In this episode, I describe how your brain and body are fundamentally wired to perceive and respond to music and how those responses can be leveraged to improve your mood, allow for processing sad emotions and enhance learning and performance throughout your lifespan. I explain the data on how music can increase motivation for cognitive or physical work, what music has been shown to enhance cognitive performance, and whether silence or music is more effective in enhancing focus while studying. I also discuss how specific music can rapidly reduce anxiety and certain prescription medications. I explain how listening to certain types of music can improve various health metrics (e.g., heart rate). Finally, I discuss how music helps to enhance neuroplasticity (rewiring of brain connections), thereby improving learning and memory. Whether you sing, play an instrument or enjoy listening to music, this episode provides numerous science-informed tools for using music to enhance productivity, mood, emotional states, and overall enjoyment of life.

For the full show notes, including articles and other resources, visit hubermanlab.com.

The Brain Body Contract

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) Music & Your Brain

(00:03:32) The Brain Body Contract

(00:04:12) Sponsors: Eight Sleep & ROKA

(00:07:09) Music & Emotions; Brain & Body Interpretation

(00:13:03) Music & Intent; Babies, Music & Movement

(00:19:19) Tool: Health Metrics & Music, Breathing & Heart Rate

(00:29:54) Sponsor: AG1

(00:30:50) Music, Brain & Predictions

(00:38:07) Music & Brain: Novelty, Arousal, Memories

(00:44:22) Tool: Movement; Motivation & Faster Music

(00:50:49) Tool: Cognitive Work & Binaural Beats

(00:54:11) Silence or Music for Studying?, White Noise, Binaural Beats

(00:58:47) Tool: Retain Information & Internal Dialogue

(01:00:53) Tool: Focus, Work Breaks & Music

(01:04:11) Physical Exercise, Performance & Music

(01:07:37) Sponsor: InsideTracker

(01:08:43) Music & Shifting Mood

(01:14:41) “Happy” vs. “Sad” Music, “One-Hit Wonders” & Artificial Intelligence

(01:19:30) “Bass Face”; Music, Movement & Facial Expressions

(01:22:46) Tools: Shift to Happy Mood with Music; Sad Mood Catharsis

(01:27:30) Tool: Music & Reducing Anxiety, “Weightless”

(01:31:16) Playing Instruments, Singing & Brain Connectivity

(01:39:58) Music & the Brain

(01:42:14) Zero-Cost Support, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter

Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac

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