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What happens to your brain when you listen to music?

It provides a total brain workout. Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory.

hopkinsmedicine.org - Keep Your Brain Young with Music | Johns Hopkins Medicine

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Keep Your Brain Young with Music

If you want to firm up your body, head to the gym. If you want to exercise your brain, listen to music. There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does. If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout. Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. The Brain-Music Connection Experts are trying to understand how our brains can hear and play music. A stereo system puts out vibrations that travel through the air and somehow get inside the ear canal. These vibrations tickle the eardrum and are transmitted into an electrical signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where it is reassembled into something we perceive as music. Johns Hopkins researchers have had dozens of jazz performers and rappers improvise music while lying down inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine to watch and see which areas of their brains light up. Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it. Try It Learn an Instrument When 13 older adults took piano lessons, their attention, memory and problem-solving abilities improved, along with their moods and quality of life. You don’t have to become a pro, just take a few lessons. Everyday Brain Boosts from Music The power of music isn’t limited to interesting research. Try these methods of bringing more music—and brain benefits—into your life. Jump-start your creativity. Listen to what your kids or grandkids listen to, experts suggest. Often we continue to listen to the same songs and genre of music that we did during our teens and 20s, and we generally avoid hearing anything that’s not from that era. New music challenges the brain in a way that old music doesn’t. It might not feel pleasurable at first, but that unfamiliarity forces the brain to struggle to understand the new sound. Recall a memory from long ago. Reach for familiar music, especially if it stems from the same time period that you are trying to recall. Listening to the Beatles might bring you back to the first moment you laid eyes on your spouse, for instance. Listen to your body. Pay attention to how you react to different forms of music, and pick the kind that works for you. What helps one person concentrate might be distracting to someone else, and what helps one person unwind might make another person jumpy.

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What is considered the perfect song?

The Beatles 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' is “the perfect pop song”, according to science. The Beatles' 1968 track 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' has been declared the most perfect pop song ever written by researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

nme.com - The Beatles 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' is scientifically "the perfect pop song"

The Beatles‘ 1968 track ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ has been declared the most perfect pop song ever written by researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The scientists analysed 80,000 different chord progressions from 700 songs recorded between 1958 and 1991, using machine learning to give a score to each chord based on how “surprising” it was compared to the chord preceding it. Chord sequences from 30 of the songs were then played to 39 volunteers, stripped of lyrics and melody to make the source track unrecognisable. The volunteers were asked to rate how enjoyable they felt each chord to be. The research found that when the volunteers were relatively sure what chord was coming next, they enjoyed being surprised instead. The research also found that being unsure of how the song would progress would cause activity in a region of the brain connected with musical pleasure. According to The Times Vincent Cheung, a PhD student at the institute, said: “It is fascinating that humans derive pleasure from a piece of music just by how sounds are ordered over time. “Songs that we find pleasant strike a good balance between us knowing what is going to happen next and surprising us with something we did not expect.” ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ was the closest song the researchers could find to “perfection”, followed by Genesis’ ‘Invisible Touch’, and BJ Thomas’ ‘Hooked on a Feeling’. The Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’, The La’s’ ‘There She Goes’, Van Halen’s ‘When It’s Love’ and UB40’s ‘Red Red Wine’ also scored highly. Despite what science has to say, John Lennon was famously disparaging of the Paul McCartney-written song, declaring it “granny music shit”.

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