How the brain works

Our brain contains billions of nerve cells arranged in patterns that coordinate thought, emotion, behavior, movement and sensation.

Deep folds and wrinkles in the brain increase the surface area of the grey matter, so more information can be processed. 

Your brain's hemispheres are divided into four lobes.

• The frontal lobes control thinking, planning, organizing, problem solving, short-term memory and movement.
• The parietal lobes interpret sensory information, such as taste, temperature and touch.
• The occipital lobes process images from your eyes and link that information with images stored in memory.
• The temporal lobes process information from your senses of smell, taste and sound. They also play a role in memory storage.

Structures deep within the brain control emotions and memories. Known as the limbic system, these structures come in pairs. Each part of this system is duplicated in the opposite half of the brain. 

• The hypothalamus controls emotions. It also regulates your body's temperature and controls crucial urges — such as eating or sleeping.
• The hippocampus sends memories to be stored in appropriate sections of the cerebrum and then recalls them when necessary.

This term in our Tuesday's experimental lessons we are devising a piece focusing on how music can affect the brain, as of this I went to do research into this and this is what I found:

Happy/sad music affects how we see neutral faces:

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn’t just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music.
Even short pieces of happy or sad music can affect us. One study showed that after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard. This also happened with other facial expressions, but was most notable for those that were close to neutral.
Something else that’s really interesting about how our emotions are affected by music is that there are two kind of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions.
This means that sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing.

Ambient noise can improve creativity

We all like to pump up the tunes when we’re powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option.
It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do.
The way this works is that moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. In other words, when we struggle (just enough) to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.
In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.
This is very similar to how temperature and lighting can affect our productivity, where paradoxically a slightly more crowded place can be beneficial.

3. Take this one with a grain of salt, because it’s only been tested on young adults (that I know of), but it’s still really interesting.
In a study of couples who spent time getting to know each other, looking at each other’s top ten favorite songs actually provided fairly reliable predictions as to the listener’s personality traits.
The study used five personality traits for the test: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.
Interestingly, some traits were more accurately predicted based on the person’s listening habits than others. For instance, openness to experience, extraversion and emotional stability were the easiest to guess correctly. Conscientiousness, on the other hand, wasn’t obvious based on musical taste.

Music training can significantly improve our motor and reasoning skills

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it’s actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns.