Music Affects The Brain Essay

Changes might be happening in your brain that you don’t even think about. When you listen to music you could simply be doing it for entertainment, but you could also be doing it to release emotion. As in, have you ever used music to find comfort like if you were depressed, listening to a song about someone else struggling with the same illness to know you’re not alone (Solace method)? Or, have you used music to vent your anger somewhere else (Discharge method)? (Ryback). And did it even help? You have most likely used music in either of these ways. The point is, music can affect your brain in many ways whether it be good or bad. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s go over some of the ways it affects the brain. One, it can be used

Also, a lot of music uses derogatory phrases and exposes children and adolescents to this which can cause a major change in their behavior. (Flud). Now, we’ll get into the technical stuff, I hope I don’t lose you. Listening to certain music causes a change in your medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Your mPFC is in charge of location, events, context, and the responses to these things, particularly emotional responses. (Euston). This basically means that music changes the way your emotions respond to certain situations, which could be a really bad thing depending on the music you listen to. In fact, a study showed that 103 of 297 of the most popular songs in 2005 contained sexual references of which 67 had degrading lyrics. But, all of those had a greater chance to include drug abuse and violence (Primack). Also, 116 of those songs had references to substance use of any kind. I know a lot of you think that this all comes from rap and hip-hop songs, but no, it’s in all genres of music. I’ll give you the numbers, 48 of 62 rap songs (77%), 22 of 61 country songs (36%), 11 of 55 hip-hop songs (20%), 9 of 66 rock songs (14%), and 3 of 35 pop songs (9%)