MRI reveals brain patterns as music reduces stress

MRI shows how listening to music can affect the brain and stress, suggest findings published September 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Researchers led by Yi Du, PhD, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing found changes in communication between brain structures when music was played, and that people who listened to music recovered from stress more quickly. 

“Compared with calming water sounds, music produced greater improvements in positive mood and supported faster recovery across several physiological measures, including heart rate, skin conductance, heart-rate variability, and cortisol,” Du told AuntMinnie. 

The brain can remain in a state of high alert after a stressful experience. And prior research shows how music affects people’s emotional state. Some benefits include reducing anxiety, blood pressure, and pain. Listening to music can also improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. 

Du and colleagues studied music’s impact on the brain and stress in a cohort of 120 healthy volunteers. They tasked the volunteers with a time-pressured mental math assignment task that caused stress. Four groups of 30 volunteers listened to music or water sounds while the researchers measured the volunteers’ mood, heart rate, sweating, and cortisol levels. 

For the brain scanning part of the study, the team used functional MRI to examine activity across the whole brain noninvasively, including deeper regions such as the insula and thalamus. 

“We then used specialized analyses to estimate both the direction of communication between brain regions and how that communication changed over time,” Du said. “This allowed us to move beyond showing that music was helpful and begin explaining how sound-processing regions interact with stress-regulation networks during recovery.” 

Volunteers who listened to music recovered from stress more quickly and experienced faster drops in heart rate and sweating, along with having a more positive mood.  

Functional MRI scans revealed communication changes in the following regions of the brain: auditory cortex, the insula, and the thalamus. 

The researchers noted that music’s benefits occurred after the volunteers completed their stressful task, with no significant benefits observed when the volunteers listened to music before the task. 

Du said the researchers will next examine how their findings can be applied beyond the laboratory setting.  

“We plan to test personally selected music, because musical preferences and listening context may influence recovery,” he told AuntMinnie. “We are also interested in studying more diverse groups, including people experiencing chronic stress or stress-related clinical conditions.” 

Du added that this work could eventually support personalized music-based interventions that adapt to an individual’s preferences and current physiological state. 

“For clinicians, the findings suggest that both timing and musical structure may matter. Music-based interventions may be particularly useful after stressful events and could be designed around patterns of tension and resolution, while also considering individual preferences,” he said. “However, clinical trials are still needed before specific treatment recommendations can be made.” 

Read the full study here.