Music and the mind

GAB NEWS
1 day ago
12 min read

When former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head in 2011, her doctors used every available tool to help her regain the ability to move and speak. Alongside speech and physical therapy, Giffords began relearning the French horn, an instrument she had played as a teenager. Music therapy helped heal the shattered connections in Giffords’s brain—a tool that she has credited with helping her reclaim her ability to speak.

Music is an extraordinary feature of the human species. It unites us and conveys feeling when words fail. It speaks to our identity as individuals and as members of a group. It is universal—found in nearly every culture and society—yet wildly diverse. It is emotionally potent but cognitively complex. In all its intricacy, music is a mirror of the brain itself, and it has its own implications for cognition, emotion, and identity.

Although it is impossible to know for sure, music produced by humans seems to exist in a class of its own. Birdsong, while melodic, is thought to convey information to potential mates or rivals. But humans create songs just for the joy of it. “There’s no known human culture that lacks something that we would probably want to call music, and people have really powerful experiences to music,” said Elizabeth Margulis, PhD, who studies music perception and cognition and is acting chair of the department of music at Princeton University. “It is an intriguing window into what makes us tick.”

While music might seem like a niche area of psychological study, it’s actually a perfect platform for learning about cognition, emotion, and identity, said Robert Zatorre, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal.

“If you really want to understand human cognition, you have to look at the whole gamut of processes, from the most basic to the most complex. And among the very top, I would place the arts, including music,” he said. Music touches on so many aspects of human cognition, from low-level functions like perceiving pitch and volume to more complex processes involving memory, attention, pattern recognition, sensorimotor interactions, learning, and emotion. “If you pick up a psychology textbook, music can inform you about each chapter,” he added.

Teaching connections

Lessons on music and the mind

The following prompts (organized by topic) can support high school and undergraduate educators in discussing the psychology of music in the classroom.

1. Motivation and EmotionMusic activates ancient reward circuits and evokes strong emotional responses. Using Robert Zatorre’s research on prediction and pleasure, explain how the brain’s reward system responds to musical patterns. How does this process compare to emotional responses triggered by survival-related stimuli like food or social bonding? Reinforces: Types of motivational processes, emotion theories, and application of psychological principles to everyday experiences.

Learning and reward

Decades ago, psychologist Steven Pinker, PhD, famously (and controversially) proposed that music was “auditory cheesecake,” a happy accident that evolved by piggybacking on evolutionarily important functions such as language and pattern recognition.

“It’s a reasonable idea. But I’ve tried to argue that you could also think about language as an offshoot of music, if you think less evolutionarily and more developmentally,” said Robert Slevc, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. People around the world speak to babies in melodic, singsong voices. And the musical features of one’s native language are some of the first sounds an infant reacts to. “There are properties of music that make it engaging and fun and get babies interested,” Slevc said. “That could bring them in and let them learn the structures that are eventually conventionalized for language.”

While that idea is just a theory, there is reason to think that studying music could help us better understand the brain processes that evolved for spoken communication. It is clear that cognition for music and language is deeply intertwined in infancy and becomes refined and separated as children grow, as Slevc and colleagues have described (In Sammler, D. [Ed.], The Oxford Handbook of Language and Music, Oxford Academic, 2025opens in new window). Eventually, that refinement results in lightning-fast abilities to categorize sounds. Slevc’s lab found that adults could reliably distinguish music from speech or environmental sounds within just 25 milliseconds (The Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, Vol. 142, No. 6, 2017opens in new window).

Indeed, while music and language both have systematic structures and share some overlapping cognitive processes, there are profound differences between melody and spoken word. Language tends to describe concrete things and deliver useful information. Music, on the other hand, seems to be superior for conveying a mood or a feeling. Zatorre discovered that firsthand as a teenager, when he first heard a recording by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and was so moved that he experienced palpitations and chills. He has since spent much of his career trying to understand why music can affect us so deeply.

Zatorre’s research showed that pleasant emotional responses to music were linked to ancient reward structures in the brain that respond to stimuli like food, sex, and drugs. “We have a reward system that has been there for 100 million years, not for music but for survival. So how does our perception of a sequence of tones lead to the activation of that reward system?” he asked. He attempted to lay out an answer in his 2023 book,From Perception to Pleasure: The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It (Oxford University Press).

The explanation, Zatorre said, may have to do with the way our brains are primed to learn. Because learning is essential for survival, we get a rush when we take in information and process it accurately. When you listen to a melody, you aren’t passively perceiving it but actively anticipating the way the sounds will unfold. “The brain is very good at making predictions about what will happen, not just in music but in all of perception. The brain likes to be able to get the correct predictions, and that generates a reward,” he said.

But the brain also likes an element of surprise. If a sound is too repetitive—like a refrigerator running—your brain quickly learns to tune it out. Music, Zatorre said, seems to hit the sweet spot between predictability and surprise. “Musicians have a strong intuitive understanding of this, and great music fits that criterion. It has enough structure that you can anticipate what’s next, yet there’s always some twist,” he said.

Music defines us

Music is not just rewarding. It is also deeply personal, and it can reveal something about our very identities. Psyche Loui, PhD, associate dean for research at Northeastern University and the president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, has used neuroimaging to explore what makes music so rewarding. She’s found that brain areas related to reward processing are more active when listening to music you choose versus music someone chooses for you, even if you enjoy what they have selected. And compared with other things that target the brain’s ancient reward system, like delicious food or the thrill of a gambling win, music tends to engage the medial prefrontal cortex even more strongly (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vol. 11, No. 6, 2016opens in new window). The region is associated with internal goals, values, and sense of agency. “That seems to reflect the idea that music you love isn’t just rewarding, but it also feels like it’s ‘ours,’” Loui said. “It’s part of our identity—how we define ourselves and how we identify friends.”

That link to identity may be why the music of our youth often remains so potent. Adults tend to strongly remember, and remain more emotionally invested in, the music they listened to as adolescents—a finding that explains why some Baby Boomers wax nostalgic for the Beatles or Motown while their now-middle-aged kids still remember every word of their favorite Nirvana song. This phenomenon, known as the “reminiscence bump,” has been shown to extend across all age groups and multiple countries (Renwick, J., & Woolhouse, M. H., Psychology of Music, Vol. 51, No. 4, 2023opens in new window).

“There’s something about the music you listened to in your adolescence that is especially loved and memorable,” Loui said. And that’s no accident. “Adolescence is a time when forming identity is especially important, and that’s also when we see this medial prefrontal cortex preference for self-selected music come online,” she added.

Yet different melodies can evoke different types of memories. Research shows that lower-energy, acoustic songs—such as “Claire de Lune” by Claude Debussy—are associated with more vivid, unique personal memories, often characterized by complex emotions like romance and adoration. More energetic tunes, like Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” are linked to memories that are more social and more exciting. Interestingly, though, high-energy tunes tend to be recalled faster, suggesting that zippier melodies may better tap into the cognitive mechanisms that enable memory retrieval (Nawaz, S., & Omigie, D., PLOS One, Vol. 20, No. 8, 2025opens in new window).

While music offers a window into memory, it can also tell us something about imagination. Margulis used AI to study participants’ descriptions of what they pictured when listening to instrumental music, repeating the study in the United States and China. Within a culture, people described strikingly similar mental images. Between cultures, however, those imaginings showed little overlap (PNAS, Vol. 119, No. 4, 2022opens in new window). “People think about imagination as the internal generation of novel things. But we’re seeing that you have really picked up on statistical patterns of association between sounds and things in the world that shape what you think,” she said.

There’s clinical potential to those findings, she added. “In conditions like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or anxiety, people get stuck in ruminative patterns,” she said. “Music may be a low-barrier entry to getting yourself out of a rut and into a different kind of internal space.”

Healing with music

Since antiquity, music has been used in healing. “But with the dawning of science, music fell out of favor as a therapeutic agent,” said Eric Waldon, PhD, a psychologist, board-certified music therapist, and program director of music therapy at the University of the Pacific in California. “Now it’s coming back full circle,” he said, with evidence-based interventions carefully designed to target specific physiological and psychological targets. “I think everybody could use more music in their lives, but music isn’t the same as music therapy. Music therapy involves interventions designed in an intentional way,” he said.

There’s a common misconception that music therapy involves listening to just the right song, carefully selected for a particular outcome, said Joke Bradt, PhD, a board-certified music therapist and professor of creative arts therapies at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies music therapy for chronic pain relief. But there’s no prescription for Mozart—and, in fact, listening may not even be the primary focus of a music therapy intervention. “Music therapy may include music listening as well as active interventions like songwriting, vocal improvisation, or even composing music,” she said.

In one example, Bradt and her colleagues developed a 12-week music therapy treatment for chronic pain that combined elements such as vocal improvisations, singing elongated vowels (which can facilitate body awareness and relaxation), and discussions of the emotions evoked by musical experiences. In a pilot study, she found large improvements in pain-related self-efficacy, depression symptoms, and the ability to participate in social activities, with moderate improvement in pain intensity, anxiety, and well-being (Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2020opens in new window).

Music therapy can be designed to improve emotion regulation in autistic people, reduce depression and anxiety in cancer patients, restore speech in a person with a traumatic brain injury, and more. To match the right intervention to the right patient, music therapists have developed frameworks such as the Therapeutic Function of Music Plan (Hanson-Abromeit, D., Music Therapy Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2015opens in new window). The framework helps music therapists clarify the goals of therapy and guides them toward the appropriate elements of tempo, pitch, volume, and other musical components.

One of the most well established types of music therapy is Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT), a standardized system of techniques that target the brain. NMT tools target a range of domains, including speech—like the therapy that helped Gabby Giffords relearn to speak—and movement. Music and movement often go hand in hand; listen to your favorite tune, and it’s hard not to tap your foot or sway to the beat. A type of NMT known as rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) builds on the natural connection between music and movement to help people with Parkinson’s disease who struggle with gait and balance. Using precise timing cues set to music, RAS can help restore the rhythmicity that is missing in a patient’s gait, Waldon explained. Research shows RAS leads to changes in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease, as well as symptom improvements (Koshimori, Y., & Thaut, M., Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, Vol. 113, No. 105459, 2023opens in new window).

Researchers are also exploring the bond between music and memory to design interventions for people with dementia. In an ongoing project, Loui pairs music and lights to help reconnect brain networks that are disrupted in people with mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer’s disease (Music and Medicine, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2025opens in new window). Participants receive a daily intervention that combines a light display choreographed to flash in time with songs that participants have preselected for their personal playlist. The rhythmic patterns are specifically chosen to stimulate the brain in a frequency known as the gamma band, which has been shown in animal models to train neural circuits to improve function and cognitive performance. As participants experience the intervention, they journal about the autobiographical memories that spring to mind. Early results suggest participants perform better on memory tasks and show related changes in brain activity compared with people who receive a speech-based intervention.

Loui’s research highlights a trend in music-based intervention research. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to dig more deeply into the mechanisms that give music its healing powers, said Bradt. She also leads the Music4Pain Research Networkopens in new window, a program funded by the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health to explore the mechanistic understanding of music-based interventions.

Such research has shown, for instance, that music therapy modulates the perception and processing of pain in both acute and chronic conditions, as Bradt described in a recent review (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1550, No. 1, 2025opens in new window). It seems to do so by engaging overlapping pain and reward circuits in the brain. And the act of sensorimotor synchronization—moving, tapping, or even breathing in sync with a melody—appears to amplify music’s pain-relieving properties. That finding makes intuitive sense to Bradt. “In my work as a music therapist, I have seen over and over that active engagement with music is more effective than just listening,” she said.

Plenty of questions remain about how music shapes our brains, from why it is such a potent feature of our lives to how best to harness music therapy to improve physical and mental health. But as researchers peel back the mechanisms that underlie our experience of music, they are uncovering principles that extend beyond mere perception of sound. As Margulis noted, music is built from patterns, but it also shapes the patterns of our cultural practices and social identities. Looking at both sides of that equation is an opportunity to gain a more holistic understanding of the human mind—and to help psychology become a more integrated science, Margulis added. “The cognitive side and the more affective, social-psychology side all come together in music. It’s an opportunity to help our field gain a more textured understanding.”

How culture shapes the sounds we hear

Music is found in almost every culture around the world—yet it differs drastically from place to place. Properties of music that feel deeply innate turn out to be far from universal, said Nori Jacoby, PhD, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. Minor and major chords, which today are ubiquitous in Western music, only emerged about 600 or 700 years ago. Many other cultures don’t even have chords and instead rely on features such as structured scale patterns —like those common in Gregorian chants—or the rhythmic architecture used by West African drum ensembles.

In collaboration with ethnomusicologists, Jacoby studies music from cultures around the world to determine what’s similar, what’s different, and what shared brain mechanisms are involved when listening to music. To overcome language barriers, Jacoby developed a method of studying music where participants tap along intuitively to a random series of beats. Then they tap along to a recording of their first tapped rhythm, repeating the exercise multiple times. The rhythms that people tap are biased toward the musical elements they’re familiar with. Over multiple iterations, the taps converge toward the most common patterns in their own culture—a kind of telephone game for melody that reveals the musical building blocks of a particular place.

Using this method to study music from 39 cultures across 15 countries, Jacoby and his colleagues found that those building blocks vary quite a bit from place to place. Yet across cultures, rhythms tend to be built on discrete elements made up of simple integer ratios such as 1:1:1 or 1:1:2 (Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 8, No. 5, 2024opens in new window). Birds also use categorical rhythms in their melodies, Jacoby showed previously, but birdsong doesn’t seem to be based on integer ratios (Current Biology, Vol. 30, No. 18, 2020opens in new window).

Other research also points toward some degree of universality in music. Robert Zatorre, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues looked at features of speech and music in 21 culturally distinct societies. They found people unfamiliar with a culture could easily distinguish speech from song based on common acoustical features (Nature Communications, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2024opens in new window). Other work has found that people can reliably identify lullabies, dance songs, and other types of music when listening to songs from unfamiliar cultures (Mehr, S. A., et al., Current Biology, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2018opens in new window).

Understanding the commonalities in human music may help us answer questions about why we evolved to be a musical species, Jacoby said. But perhaps the bigger takeaway, he added, is that we can’t answer those questions by studying Western societies alone. “Our own cultural biases are imminent to the experience of music,” he said. “For me, the most exciting discoveries are that our intuitions about music are often wrong.”