'Music is my religion' - Jimi Hendrix
I'm walking back from class, iPod in tow, and the familiar opening piano line of my favorite Sigur R??s song kicks in and, about a minute into the track, the hairs on my arm stand on end and chills run down my spine.
If you're not familiar with the band, theirs is the music that angels might make in their spare time. It's incredibly soaring, gorgeous and undeniably cathartic stuff'able to render even the most mundane moment into something profound.
I'm not a particularly spiritual guy, but I can say with absolute certainty that I've had what felt like religious experiences (or nirvana or transcendence, if you'd like) listening to music. But what is it about 'this purely abstract series of tones,' in the words of Roderick Swanston of the Royal College of Music, that makes it so affecting?
According to UW-Madison psychology professor Jenny Saffran, scientists have been studying music's effect on the brain for 'a good 100 years, as long as people have been studying auditory perception,' yet we've only begun to unravel the mystery behind music's emotional power.
'Music is such a sought-after stimulus,' said Peter Janata of Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, in an interview on National Public Radio. 'It's not necessary for human survival, yet something inside us craves it.'
An evolutionary link to music might come from its relationship to the sounds of speech. Though Saffran said this is a point of debate, with some studies suggesting that the two processes employ distinct mental machinery, David Schwartz's work with human speech suggests that melody and the spoken word are built from the same building blocks.
Schwartz, a neuroscientist at Duke University, recorded more than 100,000 brief utterances in English and 10 other languages. Schwartz took the audio and effectively put it in an aural blender, chopping up the diverse clips and, after randomly selecting a large batch, combined them and created a visual distribution of the sounds.
The data organized itself into discrete high-energy peaks and low-energy valleys. The team found that these graphical crests and depressions corresponded to the 12 familiar tones of the musical scale, the same ones you'd find in one octave of a piano.
Commenting on Schwartz's finding, Janata told NPR that 'on some level, it might be almost impossible to uncouple speech and music.'
Janata's own work has honed in on the section of the brain responsible for understanding harmony and recognizing dissonance in music. According to an NPR story by Richard Knox, Janata had eight people, all with some degree of musical experience, listen to an original piece of music that moves through all 24 major and minor keys. While the test subjects listened intently, Janata made magnetic resonance image scans of their brain activity, creating neural maps of musical experience.
According to Janata, the MRI scans led the researchers to a baseball-sized area of the brain right behind the forehead, called the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in our anticipation of what comes next (fueling our expectation of melodies that stay in key) and, more central to our enjoyment of music, integrates emotion and experience.
Each time a given listener heard the melody, the brain maps would vary slightly from session to session. According to a Dartmouth statement, 'This dynamic map may be the key to understanding why a piece of music might elicit a certain behavior one time, like dancing, and something different another time, like smiling when remembering a dance.'
But what of those elusive chills that accompany the crushing climax of a Sigur R??s track, the sonic rush of Jimmy Page's solo in 'Stairway to Heaven' or when a furry, unwashed jam-band finally switches chords?
In Steven Johnson's book 'Mind Wide Open,' the author presents the work of Jaak Panksepp, a scientist who has 'been in pursuit of the neurochemistry of chills for more than a decade.' Panksepp's research suggests that the chills are a result of 'endogenous opioid' release in the brain.
According to Johnson, these are the same brain chemicals involved in 'social bonding, parental love, the 'runner's high''and, of course, in narcotic drugs like heroin and morphine.'
Humans are not unique in their ability to dig music. Johnson cites another Panksepp study in which he played dozens of records for chickens and monitored their 'shivers of pleasure' with specialized equipment'he found that the chickens exhibit the chill response, as well.
According to the study, the chickens especially seemed to enjoy Pink Floyd.
So it seems that music's emotional resonance might come from its cerebral connection to this wealth of powerful human experience. It doesn't make us more fit for survival, help us reproduce or fulfill any other distinctly evolutionary concerns, yet its cultural importance is limitless.
Beethoven called music 'a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy ... the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.' And this is coming from a deaf man.
