“What an odd thing it is to see an entire species—billions of people—playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call ‘music’” [1].
This remark began Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, a book written by Oliver Sacks, the British born neurologist renowned for transforming clinical case studies into humanistic literature [1].
Odd indeed that we ubiquitously drift away in the flow of music alone in our room and surrounded by strangers. Odd that music originated over 40,000 years ago. Odd that the history of music is as ancient as humanity itself.
Why are we so oddly and continuously drawn to music?
We derive our answer from modern neuroscience: music is not just simply a form of art and a source of pleasure but also a cognitively powerful tool. The human brain is widely considered to be a “prediction machine” that constantly anticipates future events by generating and updating a mental “model” based on past experience [2]. By anticipating future sounds and musical events, the brain reduces uncertainty and minimizes the energy to process every detail of the environment.
This predictive drive is exactly what music exploits. Through the lens of music theory, music is built by three fundamental components: melody, harmony, and rhythm [3]. These components are all built from patterns, and our “prediction machine” loves patterns, from which it can learn, update, and enhance future performance.
Our brain doesn’t wait passively for the following notes but forms expectations: the next beat, phrase ending, and harmonic resolution. When the music confirms our prediction, we feel satisfied, the brain’s reward system is triggered to release dopamine, a “feel-good” hormone. This is a pathway to our increasing affection toward music [4].
And sometimes, this affection goes too far. The music you love or a random excerpt just keeps on playing in your head—colloquially called an earworm—hijacking attention during a test. This experience is often known as involuntary musical imagery, or “a conscious mental experience of music that occurs without deliberate efforts to initiate or sustain it” [5]. This happens, again, because the brain's prediction system is naturally inclined to replay catchy, recently heard musical patterns.
What about actively listening to music when performing cognitive tasks such as studying? Is it actually disruptive?
In the 1990s, a group of researchers claimed that after listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos (K488) for 10 minutes, spatial-temporal reasoning and intelligence were boosted significantly, and this became known as the Mozart effect [6]. The arousal-mood hypothesis was developed to explain the Mozart effect by suggesting that external stimuli such as music improve cognitive performance not directly, but by increasing arousal (one’s mental energy and intensity) and creating a positive mood [7].
However, a recent review article published in 2022 shows that the answer to whether background music is disruptive during study is rather complicated [8]. Their findings showed a broadly negative effect: background music generally impaired memory and language related tasks, with lyrical music proving more disruptive than instrumental. Only limited positive effects were identified. Nonetheless, the full picture still remains elusive and requires more controlled research.
Memory is perhaps the most striking and crucial cognitive domain where music leaves its mark. Sacks describes Clive Wearing, a musician with severe herpes encephalitis-induced amnesia. This syndrome caused his memory to reset every few seconds and destroyed his episodic memory, or memories of specific past, everyday events and contextual details associated with them [9]. However, his musical abilities (including playing and reading music) and emotional attachment to his wife remained intact. Music and love, in this case, outlasted mundane facts [1].
You may be wondering why. The “storage” of facts and music rely on different memory systems [10]. Facts often depend on declarative memory, especially the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes systems that support new episodic and semantic learning, while music is supported by procedural, emotional, auditory, and motor networks that usually stay relatively intact even when declarative memory is badly damaged [11]. In other words, music is distributed and not stored in a single place like facts. Music is tied to rhythm, melody, motor habits, emotion, and autobiographical associations.
The interesting effects of music on our cognition doesn’t stop with memory. There are so many unexpected and unsolved cases in Sacks’ book: a man struck by lightning suddenly developed an intense passion for piano music, specific music triggering seizures, and the broad spectrum of musical talent—from extreme sensitivity to nearly total absence [1].
No matter what, Sacks writes that “this propensity to music—this ‘musicophilia’—shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginning of our species” [1].