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 t...