Music is an artform that pervades all cultures; and is widely acknowledged to serve essential adaptive purposes.

But what exactly is music? There are numerous theories regarding its origin; some believe its development grew as a means of communicating between individuals, while others see it as an outlet to soothe anxiety or stimulate pleasure.

Motivation

Music can help stimulate the part of your brain that regulates motivation. More specifically, it can increase levels of motivation by making you feel good, as reported by Scientific American. Furthermore, music may even help ease pain from physical exercise by competing against the sensations such as heartbeat increase and sweaty palms to take your attention away from discomfort during exercise sessions.

Listening to music helps strengthen new neural connections in your brain, which is why it is beneficial to listen to various genres and acquire instruments.

Listening to music can provide extra motivation when engaged in cognitive tasks like studying or work. Studies have demonstrated that listening to music increases time spent on cognitive tasks while decreasing errors made; listening also reduces distractions while improving your mood, which may help when trying to focus for long and tedious study sessions.

Stimulation

Music can stimulate your brain in much the same way that exercise does, providing memory, focus and attention boosts. Listening to upbeat music before an important presentation or test may give you extra confidence that can lead to successful performances. Music also reduces stress and boosts immunity by regulating cortisol hormones that control inflammation in the body.

People with impaired hearing can often experience music by feeling vibrations through their bodies. Deaf musicians are an extremely common presence across all fields of performance from classical to rap.

Music activity can provide excellent cognitive exercise and studies have revealed that those trained musically are less likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s. Integrate music into your family’s daily activities whether listening to upbeat playtime music or soothing classical before bed, or incorporate learning an instrument as an enjoyable way for your children to practice key skills.

Distraction

Music has the ability to improve focus and concentration for some individuals; however, it may also serve to distract and reduce working memory capacity in others if its volume or lyrics prove distracting or reduce working memory capacity. How well music helps ultimately depends on personal taste as well as genre volume tempo of its source material.

Complex tasks, like writing a paper or solving an equation, require your working memory. Music may distract from these endeavors; therefore, it would be best to avoid listening to it while tackling these activities. On the other hand, simpler tasks don’t necessitate so much working memory; therefore music could enhance them.

For optimal results, it is best to study with instrumental music or songs to which you do not recognize the lyrics. Musical familiarity – particularly emotional attachment to its melody – may cause distraction and interfere with concentration. Personality may also play a part; introverts may find music stimulating or too stimulating for their tastes.

Working Memory

Working memory is used to temporarily store information while it is being processed, and research indicates that music may help enhance this skill. This could be related to musicians having better verbal working memories than non-musicians, or simply that learning music strengthens neural networks associated with this function.

Studies using event-related potentials have demonstrated how music training improves inhibitory control, an important executive function for working memory. Furthermore, other neuroimaging techniques, like fMRI imaging, have revealed that listening to music increases blood flow to key brain regions related to attention and cognitive control.

One such study used the widely-adopted n-back task to compare performance among musically trained and untrained children. Participants listened to either unfamiliar Western or familiar Rwandan relaxing music while researchers recorded brain activity. Researchers noted that both groups saw improvements, with musically trained children experiencing greater improvements than their untrained peers.