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

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 of 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, but 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 neuro ensembles, I.e. 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, stuff 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 neuroplasticity, 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 prefer 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 10 in Melbourne and the Plenary Theatre. The second live event will take place on February 17 in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House, and the third event will take place on February 23 in Brisbane at the Great Hall. To access tickets to any of these events, Simply go to hubermanlab.com 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 eight Sleep eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep that is getting enough quality sleep each night is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that your body temper temperature drops by about 1 to 3 degrees at the beginning of the night. Indeed, that is how your body falls and stays deeply asleep as well. In order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your bodily temperature needs to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. Eight sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment, allowing you to fall and stay deeply asleep throughout the night and to wake up feeling refreshed. I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover well over two years ago and it has completely transformed my sleep. It's allowed me to fall asleep more quickly, it's allowed me to sleep more deeply throughout the night, and if I happen to wake up during the middle of the night, something that's perfectly normal to do once or even twice, I fall back asleep far more quickly and I wake up feeling refreshed. As a consequence, my mood, focus and alertness throughout the day is greatly elevated as compared to prior to sleeping on my Eight Sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, you can go to eightsleep.com huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I've spent a lifetime working on the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly in different environments. Roka understands the biology of the visual system and has designed their eyeglasses and sunglasses so that you always see with crystal clarity. Originally their glasses were designed for performance, that is for running and cycling and for sport, and indeed they can still be used for performance. They won't slip off your face if you get sweaty. They're extremely lightweight. But I should mention that Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses come in some of the aesthetics more typically associated with performance glasses, like those cyborg style glasses, but they also have a number of styles that you would be perfectly comfortable wearing out to dinner or to work. I wear readers at night or when I drive and I wear sunglasses during the day if I happen to be driving into bright light or outside and it's just overwhelmingly bright. I do not wear sunglasses when I do my morning sunlight viewing to set my circadian rhythm, and I suggest that you do the same. If you'd like to try Roka eyeglasses or sunglasses, you can go to roka R-O-K-A dot com and enter the code HUBERMAN to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's roka R-O-K dashA dot com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Okay, let's talk about music and your brain. And to start off, I just want to take a step back and acknowledge something that is absolutely remarkable about music, which is, if you think about language, 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 it 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, 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 Deisseroff, 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, 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 or 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 rat tat tat, we're talking drumming of this sort. And perhaps the cadence of that drumming changes such that as it's approaching, it gets more and more frequent. 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. Now, the second set of tones 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, that convey a sense of aggressive intent. 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 going to 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 going to hurt you. Okay. Or if I put it as a question, I'M going to 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. And on and on. It's been demonstrated, for instance, that babies as young as 3 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, etc. 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 3 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. 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 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 have 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. Here. We've made some important discoveries in recent years. 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 are 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, 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 brake 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 and 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 of. 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, 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 and 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. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. AG1 is a vitamin, mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs. Now, of course, I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day. But oftentimes I simply can't get enough servings. But with AG1, I'm sure to get enough vitamins and minerals and the probiotics that I need. And it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress. Simply put, I always feel better when I take AG1. I have more focus and energy, and I sleep better. And it also happens to taste great. For all these reasons, Whenever I'm asked, if you could take just one supplement, what would it be? I answer AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, go to drink ag1.comhuberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.comhuberman 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 going to get everything that I need to get done 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 you know, 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@hubermanlab.com you can access those easily by putting motivation into the search function. @hubermanlab.com, all of that will come up timestamped, 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 and state to a new position and 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 articulate brain area, believe it or not, even from the olfactory system, from the system in the brain responsible for smell, there seems to be some significant shift in terms of the neural firing there or the release of neurochemicals, 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 going to 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 that communicate with one another, 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, you know, 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, 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 sh, 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, etc. 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 mixtape 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 mixtape 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 like, get down past the top and then you get to the middle thing, you're like, oh, this thing's 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 mesolimbic reward pathway could perhaps better be called the mesolimbic reinforcement pathway. So for those of you out there shouting, wait. The mesolimbic 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 mesolimbic 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 a 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, a 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, and 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, 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 8 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. They're 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. 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 parabrachial 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 or 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 catecholamines, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine and epinephrine. 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, unless 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 perhaps 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 Hz, it's a particular frequency of sound, 40 Hz binaural beats, that it can enhance concentration and focus. However, this is important. There's 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 Hz 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 Hz 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. Shh. 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 you know there's certainly no obligation to use them. Likewise with 40 Hz binaural beats, and for binaural beats, you can also find those as zero cost YouTube scripts. There are a number of zero cost apps that will allow you to Listen to binaural beats. I've used the app brain wave for some period of time now. To be honest, I've never done this strict control experiment on myself of listening to the 40 Hz binaural beats or not listening to 40 Hz 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 Hz 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 listen to their favorite music while doing cognitive work. And. 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. I'd 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 Hz 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 Hz 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 a study that compared 40 Hz 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 Hz 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, I.e. 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 the goal of a science and science based protocols podcast is to optimize everything. In fact, I 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'm.