Why Music Makes Us Happy

Sounds, melodies and rhythms touch our heart. Brain researchers and physicians unravel the mystery of music and use them even for pain relief.

It was the darkest moment of his life, the Eric Clapton processed in one of his most famous songs. He published "Tears in Heaven" a few months after his four-year-old son Conor fell to his death in March 1991 in an accident on the 53rd floor of a New York skyscraper. The caretaker had left open to unobserved for a moment one of the floor to ceiling living room windows to clean, while the child ran around in the skyscraper apartment. Many fans do not know the story probably when they sing along to Clapton's ballad "Would you know my name if I see you in heaven?"

They are able to make you happy in different ways often sad songs, people, as recently British scientists researched by the University of Oxford. So how successful musicians and composers, to pack great emotions in music and transport, people can bring out the emotions from the music and feel. Especially those people who are exceptionally compassionate, also draw from sad music positive energy. Why is that? This question more and more brain researchers, psychologists and who want to unravel the mystery of music other scientists.

One of them is the brain researcher who teaches at the University in Bergen, Norway. The Max Planck researchers originally completed a music degree for violin, piano and composition at the Conservatory of Bremen. But instead of a professional musician career, he decided after a psychology degree. The university brought him with the emerging neuroscience contact: The researchers distinguished with the most modern medical complex activity in the brain regions after. Today he is considered one of the most famous music psychologists in the world.

Among other things, the 48-year-old professor explores how music works in the brain and it can be used for medical therapies. So makes music happy because it triggers the processes known for the well-being neurotransmitter dopamine in the reward center of the brain? This is a common mistake, says he: "Dopamine is a fun hormone, not a happy hormone," says the scientist. "Music makes of course fun. The sounds are beautiful, it makes dancing fun to have parties or to make music themselves. "Unfortunately, the people confused in our culture increasingly fun with luck, the psychologist says. "Music can also actually make you happy," he stresses.

Music and Community
"Happiness is almost always related to social connections to other people," explains he. "Happiness does not have much money to eat lots of chocolate, lots of shopping or take about a lot of cocaine: These are all things that distribute much dopamine in the brain. Fun experiences that can make very unhappy in the end"

The core of the lucky experience of music lies in its social aspect: "Even if you sitting alone in an armchair and a headphone touches that simulates brain lot of community activity. The brain knows make the other for shared music. You feel the music approached and experienced by a communication. "Today, we can watch with EEG measurements of brain waves and magnetic resonance imaging the brain at work. The so-called imaging techniques reveal how music responds to complex, many regions of the brain at once.

One of the most interesting insights to the understanding of music is that the brain does not make much difference between music and language. "We see in the brain that the processing of music and language is very similar and runs in almost the same neural networks." The language follows certain rhythm and melody. "Infants learn much of the talk about the music content in the language," says Koelsch. Even when listening to speech and music the neurons in the brain as active as when talking or playing music.

Also the feeling of the music often resembles the language. For example, a real Chinese Peking Opera affects many Europeans inharmonious to disturbing. "It's like when you people with a foreign language, they do not know: It sucks after a while." Who is not familiar with the rules and laws of other music, can not do anything. "Even the then new music of Ludwig van Beethoven was dismissed by contemporaries as too harsh and dissonant," says this person. "But if you would cancel out all the dissonances of Beethoven, his plays would be deadly boring."

Music can reduce pain
Many people working on how music can help as therapy. "But music does not work like a syringe, through which you can inject happiness," says him. "So our brain does not work, otherwise you could help every depressed patients. But music is a great means a lot to evoke positive-acting neurons and to make those neurons quiet, which are there to suppress a feeling of happiness. "

He has shown that patients need for surgery under local anesthetic less anesthetic when they hear during music.