Piano music helped young adults recover from stress faster than water sounds did, and brain scans traced a stronger signal from ear to body.<\/p>\n
After a hard day, people put on soft piano music or a recording of rain to relax. Whether music offers any benefit beyond the calming effect of rain has been hard to say.<\/p>\n
Earlier experiments often compared music with silence, and stress fades on its own in silence too.<\/p>\n
So researchers in Beijing compared relaxing piano pieces with water sounds in 120 young adults who had just sat through a stressful math test. <\/p>\n
The music did more: mood recovered further and heart rates fell faster. Timing mattered, though, because the same music played before the test didn\u2019t blunt the stress.<\/p>\n
Inside a brain scanner, music also changed how the part of the brain that hears communicates with the parts that monitor the body. <\/p>\n
The researchers suggest that music does more than distract: its structure gives a recovering brain something to reorganize around.<\/p>\n
How music changes stress<\/p>\n
Yi Du led the work at the Institute of Psychology<\/a> of the Chinese Academy of Sciences<\/a>, with Siqi You and Guowei Wu. Lei Zhang of the Rotman Research Institute<\/a> at Baycrest in Toronto is a co-author.<\/p>\n \u201cMusic is a highly structured signal that unfolds through cycles of anticipation, tension, and resolution,\u201d Du said. <\/p>\n \u201cOur findings suggest that the brain may use this evolving structure as a scaffold to reorganize its stress-regulation networks, helping both the mind and body return to a more balanced state.\u201d<\/p>\n Music before the test changed little<\/p>\n The stress came from timed arithmetic: three seconds per problem, and some problems took several steps of dividing and multiplying. <\/p>\n The screen told the volunteers each time whether they were right, wrong or too slow.<\/p>\n The volunteers completed four timed rounds of just over a minute each, with the later rounds more difficult. Their mood fell, while heart rate, sweating, and cortisol levels rose.<\/p>\n In the first experiment, 60 adults in their early twenties came in on two days a week apart. They listened before the test on one day and after it on the other. <\/p>\n Half heard relaxing piano pieces from a library of Chinese music, and half heard raindrops, streams, waves and waterfalls at the same volume.<\/p>\n Mood was surveyed and saliva was collected five times, while sensors on the fingers tracked heart rate<\/a> and sweat. <\/p>\n Music played before the test didn\u2019t reduce the initial stress response any more than the water sounds did.<\/p>\n Recovery was faster with music<\/p>\n Played afterward, the music helped more than the water sounds did. Both groups recovered, but the music listeners reported a bigger rise in positive mood, and their heart rates dropped more. <\/p>\n Their skin conductance, a measure of sweating, fell faster too.<\/p>\n A second group of 60 went through the same test inside an MRI scanner, then listened through three runs while the machine recorded. <\/p>\n Cortisol was lower in the music listeners across the recovery period.<\/p>\n By the last run, a heart-rhythm measure linked to the balance between the body\u2019s alarm system and its rest system had shifted further toward rest in the music group.<\/p>\n A pathway from sound to body<\/p>\n Sound is processed in a strip of cortex on each side of the brain, the auditory cortex. Deeper in, a folded region called the insula monitors what\u2019s happening in the body, from heartbeat to breath. <\/p>\n A hub in the middle, the thalamus, helps set how alert the system is.<\/p>\n During the hard math rounds, the insula and thalamus were more active than during the easy ones, in both groups. <\/p>\n Compared with water sounds, music changed how these regions communicated afterward. Early in recovery, the signal from the auditory cortex to the insula strengthened.<\/p>\n Later, the signal from the insula to the thalamus strengthened, and the bigger that increase, the more a listener\u2019s positive mood improved. That link was modest. <\/p>\n The authors describe the whole pattern as a pathway: sound reaching the region that senses the body, then that region reaching the one that sets arousal.<\/p>\n Musical tension mirrored brain changes<\/p>\n On a later day, the music listeners heard the same pieces again. This time they rated, moment by moment from 0 to 100, how much tension and pleasure they felt. The team then lined those ratings up with the scans.<\/p>\n As tension rose, activity in the auditory cortex fell. Earlier studies of people enjoying music in a calm state, including a 2013 study<\/a> in Science, reported more activity there, not less. <\/p>\n Du\u2019s team reads the drop as a brain that can predict<\/a> where a phrase is going, so that each build and release surprises it less.<\/p>\n A stressed brain that is settling down is another explanation, and the study wasn\u2019t built to tell the two apart.<\/p>\n Tension also tracked the connections: early in recovery, rising tension went with stronger coupling between the auditory cortex and the insula. <\/p>\n By the third run, with heart rate and sweating near normal, higher tension went with weaker signaling from the insula to the thalamus. The authors interpret that as the stress network<\/a> settling back toward baseline.<\/p>\n The music was chosen by the researchers<\/p>\n The piano pieces came from a research library, chosen for a relaxing mood and matched for loudness. Nobody heard their own playlist. <\/p>\n The researchers note that a person\u2019s own music can shift emotion<\/a> more strongly than pieces picked for them.<\/p>\n Everyone was a healthy young adult with normal hearing. People scoring high for anxiety or depression were screened out, and so were people with low resilience or little pleasure in music. <\/p>\n In one exploratory analysis, listeners who said they get the most from music by sharing it got less heart-rate relief lying alone in a scanner tube.<\/p>\n A favorite album is still untested<\/p>\n Whether a favorite album does what these piano pieces did is an open question. So is whether any of this holds in people whose anxiety or depression kept them out of the study.<\/p>\n Du\u2019s team calls for a version that changes the stress level while tracking what the listener expects next. Longer sampling after the test would show whether the calm<\/a> carries over.<\/p>\n For now, the finding covers one kind of music, in one kind of listener, in the minutes after one stressful test.<\/p>\n The full study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Piano music helped young adults recover from stress faster than water sounds did, and brain scans traced a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[103,61,60,410,411],"class_list":["post-630523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}