When Songs Are Your Friends
How do you listen to music?
I don’t mean “Are you a headphones person or more of a
speaker fan?” I mean, what parts of your brain do you use?
“The same parts of the brain everyone else uses,” you may be
tempted to say. But hold on: it’s a little more complicated than that.
It turns out that highly empathetic people experience music more
deeply than the rest of the population, and there’s a neuroscience reason why.
About 20% of the population is considered highly empathetic.
These folks are unusually attuned to the emotions of the people around them.
They may be overwhelmed by crowds, loud noises, or unusually needy or talkative people.
But there are benefits, it seems—and not just the benefits associated with
being able to read situations more accurately.
In a study—the first of its kind—by Southern Methodist
University, Dallas, and UCLA, 20 UCLA undergrad students climbed into an fMRI
machine and listened to passages of music either familiar or unfamiliar to them
while having their brains scanned. (The familiar music was chosen by each
subject ahead of time.) Next, each student filled out a questionnaire designed
to measure empathy levels, for instance, how frequently they felt bad for
others.
While it is awfully hasty to draw a conclusion from such a
small sample size, those early findings were interesting. The participants who
tested as highly empathetic responded to music using the same brain regions as
the low-empathy people—along with some additional ones. Beyond just the regions
relating to audio, emotion, and sensory-motor processing, the brains of the
empathetic students lit up in areas dealing with social interaction, and showed
increased activity in the reward system.
In other words, to the highly empathetic crowd, the
enjoyment of a song may be “perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an
imagined or virtual human presence,” said lead author Zachary Wallmark. And the
higher reward system activation creates a heightened incentive to keep chasing
that “music high,” so to speak.
(Fittingly, those same students also reported enjoying the
new, unfamiliar music more than their peers.)
Again, it’s a little soon to draw overarching conclusions
from an experiment with a mere 20 subjects, but it does contribute to a growing
theory that music enjoyment in general piggybacks off brain systems designed to
facilitate social interaction. And you, too, are empathetic, it might help to
explain why listening to your favorite song can feel like spending time with an
old friend: it’s pinging the same parts of your brain.
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