Music is considered a cross-cultural phenomenon, a foundation or core of any culture. It has a powerful influence on the vast majority of human beings, even if they do not identify themselves as particularly musical. People are most often comfortable with music, but the power of music is much greater – it usually has the capacity to stimulate and regulate emotions and to influence cognition or cognitive abilities. Understanding these effects of music on humans has become of increasing interest to neuroscientists in recent decades.
A growing body of research shows that various music interventions can help treat a wide range of health problems, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, substance dependence disorders and so on. Also, numerous studies have shown that music can promote healthy human development throughout the lifespan. In the B-AIR Soundings broadcast produced by Ana Kuder and Manca Kok, members of the Brain Week organising group under SiNAPSA, the Slovenian Society for Neuroscience, our topic is music processing in the brain. With Rebecca Schaefer, clinical neuropsychologist and head of the Music, Brain, Health and Technology research group at Leiden University (Netherlands), we addressed the questions: how do different people experience music differently? How can the environment we grow up in influence our perception of music? How is music connected to movement? What is the magic ingredient that music has that we can use in healthcare?
Music activates several different areas in the human brain, primarily the auditory regions of the brain of course, but it can also stimulate the areas of the brain responsible for working memory when we realise that we have heard a particular pattern of music before; or the areas accountable for episodic memory, when music reminds us of a specific period in our lives. So it is essential to understand that music can activate a whole range of brain regions – but how can we harness this particular ability? Manca Kok, a psychology student at the University of Amsterdam, spoke to clinical neuropsychologist prof. Rebecca Schaefer and clinical psychologist Johanna Perschl about the role of music in rehabilitation.