8 Musical Facts That Will Blow Your Mind!

1) It has been proven that the chills we get while listening to a certain song is caused be the brains release of dopamine into the blood.

Scientists recruited people who reliably get shivers when listening to an affective score. The chills are a consistent, in the moment measure of pleasure than asking how test subjects felt. Scientists used brain-imaging techniques that revealed that the music caused dopamine peaks coupled with emotional arousal.
The release of dopamine during music explains why such a high value is put on it and why music can manipulate our emotions. The effect that music has on us is quite comparable to other pleasures. Some examples are the joy of eating food, sex, and other tangible rewards.
Music can quite literally move us or the chemicals in our brains. The fact that music can really give us a rush like sex does is incredible. Well, the sensation is released from the same part of the brain at least.

Listening to actual non-terrible music has an additional effect, since pleasurable music releases dopamine that simply makes certain parts of your brain function better (particularly if they were damaged before)
Dopamine is your brain's natural crack

In a nutshell, music gives your brain a massage and fills it with happy chemicals, turning into a peace loving happy camper with a brand new suede jacket.
2) Music can actually change your heart beat, seriously!

Music can be so powerful it can affect your mood, brainwaves, and even your heartbeat! It turns out that when we listen to music our body reacts to the sounds we hear.
If a person listens to rock or techno, their heartbeat will involuntarily speed up. The opposite is true if someone listens to more calming or instrumental music.
Music is so influential it can alter your heartbeat, pulse rate, blood pressure, decrease your muscle tension, and even affect your body movement and coordination!
 
3) Music has been proven to be ass addictive as heroin, sex and cigarettes

When most individuals really like a song, they experience chills and a “high” of sorts, which may give them a lot of energy and a pleasurable feeling. Those who put songs on repeat all the time want to re-experience those sensations over and over again.
But, in addition to the already-famous chills, listening to music you like also triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in underlying pleasurable reactions caused by food, drugs and arousal before intercourse.
The chemical has been linked in a variety of studies with mechanisms underlying addiction in humans, and it would appear that it also plays a role in the way people feel when listening to their favorite tunes.
In the new investigation, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor, who both hold appointments as neuroscientists at the McGill University, detail the pathways through which dopamine acts on the brain.
Details of the investigation were recently published in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, experts at the Northwestern University's MEDILL news service report.
Scientists with the research team measured a variety of factors influencing perception and the human body in the new experiments. They monitored dopamine release in test subjects, and also their heart rates, body temperature and other such effects.
Participants were asked to listen to some of their favorite tunes while their brains were being observed using a imaging technique known as Position Emission Tomography (PET).
“Dopamine is important because it makes us want to repeat behaviors. It’s the reason why addictions exist, whether positive or negative,” Salimpoor explains in an email.
“In this case, the euphoric ‘highs’ from music are neurochemically reinforced by our brain so we keep coming back to them. It’s like drugs. It works on the same system as cocaine,” he adds.
“It’s working on the same systems of addiction, which explain why we’re willing to spend so much time and money trying to achieve musical experiences,” the expert goes on to say.
“This is the first time that we’ve found dopamine release in response to an aesthetic stimulus. Aesthetic stimuli are largely cognitive in nature. It’s not the music that is giving us the ‘rush.' It’s the way we’re interpreting it,” Salimpoor concludes.
 
4) Europe has "Silent Discos." You listen to music on your headphones

Due to noise ordinances in Europe, club owners have created "silent discos" where clubbers listen to music through headphones. Rather than use a speaker system, some club owners have resorted to wireless headphones to entertain club goers.
Music is broadcasted via FM-transmitter to the clubber's headphones. It's called "silent discos." The style of clubbing is popular for music festivals, when people want to party long after noise ordinances would allow. Two DJ's often compete for the listeners, too.
Silent disco has become a common name for a disco where people dance to music listened to on wireless headphones. Rather than using a speaker system, music is broadcast via a radio transmitter with the signal being picked up by wireless headphone receivers worn by the participants. Those without the headphones hear no music, giving the effect of a room full of people dancing to nothing. Often two DJs compete for listeners. Silent discos are popular at music festivals as they allow dancing to continue past noise curfews. Similar events are "mobile clubbing" gatherings, where a group of people dance to the music on their personal music players.
 
5) When musicians write and perform together, they share a mental link

Scientists conducted a study with trained guitarists in which they attached electrodes to their heads while they played a duet. They discovered that the brain waves coordinated between the two partners in order to perform the music together.These findings suggest that brain waves coordinate in order to perform a collective task, in this case, a jazz guitar duet. The same principle can be applied to a capella groups, orchestras, small ensembles, and just about any other instance in which musicians are required to play in tune with each other.
Its really amazing, In my personal experience how fast a simple jam can turn into a flowing masterpiece, at least to the ones playing it out. Scientist’s at Stanford University argue that this is the closest measurable record of human telepathy.

6) Music can repair your brain man!

Slapping neuroscience right across the face, music is able to take stroke, lesion or other brain-damaged patients who have lost the partial ability to see or speak and return it to them. The Kenny Rogers Effect--not named because it deals with gorging yourself on chicken or replacing your old, grandfatherly face with a shiny new rubber one--takes patients with visual neglect, the inability to recognize half of what they see, and lightens the effects of the damage. Patients who only shave half their face or grab for the right boob at a strip club can now put that dollar bill in the left or right side of her thong. The Gambler never stops being awesome.
Patients with left-side brain damage who can no longer speak can find they are able to sing words, often without trouble or training. After that, it's just a matter of time before they're able to speak simple sentences with practice. That may not sound like much, but if you've ever tried to order a side of fries with left-hand only charades you'll understand what a blessing this can be.
How Does it Work?
Melodic intonation therapy, or singing until you can talk, takes advantage of the fact that language functions are located in the left brain, but music lives over on the right side of the brain. So, when that asshole stroke robs you of your ability to speak, you can train your brain to move those functions to the other side by associating music with language. This essentially rewires a lifetime of growth and an entire history of evolution into meaninglessness interpretations of random head noises from a guy who hasn't shaved his beard since the 70s.

 

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18405_7-insane-ways-music-affects-body-according-to-science.html#ixzz2rJFcmDXl

7) Increase your reasoning skills!

If only there were some way to make yourself seem smarter without working. Oh, wait, there is. Mozart music, especially piano music, can raise your spatial reasoning the equivalent of nine IQ points. And that's an average, meaning there are people who get even more of a boost from it. That's over half a standard deviation or the difference between being Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape or Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Sure, you're not winning a Nobel Prize either way, but it's still a noticeable difference.
How Does it Work?
There are a lot of theories, but some claim that Mozart's music focuses the listener more, like how if you're in the midst of your sixth hour of questing in World of Warcraft you can still rain holy hell down on Hogger as long as you're listening to Ace of Spades. Others say it increases activity in crucial regions of the brain and a few industrious types say "who cares why it works, how can we make money off of this?"
8) Opens portals to another dimension
Every time you put on song, no matter what song it is, the frequencies residing within that song are just enough to send rippled of harmonic vibrations out in a spiral and open tiny portholes into what science calls “Pocket Universes”.
Not much is know about these mystical places or how exactly the portals are opened and why, but its super friggin interesting to think about your favorite song opening a wormhole into another dimension.
It gives a whole new meaning to the age old term “this song really moves me”