Learn more about scienceandnature with this collection
How to choose the right music for different tasks
The benefits of listening to music while working
How music affects productivity
How much you like a song depends mostly on how well you can predict what comes next. Great musicians play with your brain and expectations in the way that they get you to expect something, and then surprise you, before taking you back to comfortable terrain.
A great song surprises you, but not too much. It balances the familiar with the unknown and therefore creates the perfect mix of comfort and excitement.
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While many areas of the brain light up simultaneously during music, such as your subcortical structures, auditory cortices, the hippocampus, and others, something unique happens the very first time you hear any song: a certain set of neurons fires together, and a unique, abstract, generalized imp...
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“For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "...
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Our brains have mirror neurons, which are neurons that fire both when performing an action and when observing someone else performing that action.
Scientists have tested this as a theory and proved that, for example, when people listened to or watched someone eat an apple, ...
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“Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world."
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Neuroanatomically, music is being processed in parallel by many different regions.
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A small minority of scientists argue that music only serves hedonic purposes – a byproduct of language and is only a pastime for us to feel pleasure. That would mean that if you eliminated all music from the world, life would just go on as if nothing happened.
The m...
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There are 2competing theories.
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“The common neural mechanisms that underlie perception of music and memory for music help to explain how it is that songs get stuck in our heads. Scientists call these ear worms, from the German Ohrwurm, or simply the stuck song syndrome.”
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“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.”
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