Music is the same as love and sex

If I had to check out an alien being from another part of the universe, the first thing I would do is play music and see if the alien is affected by it in some way. Only then will I engage. Oh sure, it is probably important to know if the alien eats (humans), chats, reads minds, has weapons of mass confusion (for humans anyway) or maybe to some, if it even has a sense of fashion. But to me, if this alien wants to occupy precious space on my planet, music has to figure in his or her (or whatever) being. This is because music is as essential to us as all those other things that alien-checkers might look for and this essential element is key to our complexity as humans.

Forget what you learned that the only human essentials are “food, clothing and shelter”. Music, as far as the brain is concerned is like love. It is as fundamental as food and sex. We know this because we can now look at what happens to our brains when we experience something as basic as food or sex and see that music hits those neural notes as well.

I am not being poetic but literal and scientific. Music feeds on to the same processes that give us these raging highs, not just when we experience music but when we anticipate it. Dopamine  and opioid – the Simon and Garfunkel of neurotransmitters, those chemicals that you yourself manufacture when you feel rewarded and/or blissful – do an equivalent concert in your brain when you are experiencing music.

A study found that dopamine is released both when anticipating and experiencing the “high” in the music you love to hear. Dopamine, the same chemical you release when you win a game, eat the food you find delicious, lay your eyes on the one you love, is certainly also doing a repertoire in your brain when you experience music. Not only that, it lingers in a specific brain part (caudate nucleus) when you anticipate hearing the music you love, so that you get that “high” even before you listen to music. This is what motivates you to play that song or go to that concert.

A most recent study also found that the natural opioids your brain makes that give you those good feelings and even reduce pain, are definitely released when people listen to the music they themselves chose as one they liked. They were certain because in the study, they gave the subjects a drug that is widely known to decrease the opioids in the brain. Those who got the “joy killer” drug reported less emotion from the songs which they themselves previously labelled as their “joy giver” or even “joy spiker”.

But there is a difference in the rewarding feeling we have when we get it from music than from food or any conspicuously happy situation. We humans also volunteer to hear even “sad” music and this is pleasurable to us. There are also musical pieces that make our hair literally stand and this is what scientists call “musical chills” or for some, “skin orgasms”. Studies have shown that most humans are moved by music this way, giving us goosebumps or making us cry.  Musical pleasures do not come in shapes that fit right into clear cut containers of pure basic emotions. They are all mixed in – nostalgia, appreciation of beauty, feeling the feeling – among others, complex pieces of varied emotions in and out of your own inner musical cathedral.  This means that whatever Lady Gaga’s music could do to you could drive an alien into cosmic confusion.

Music can also do things to audiences that film makers have exploited even during the era of silent films. Even when there was no dialogue heard in those films, there was music. And indeed, music makes a happy face happier and a sad face, sadder. This means that when you listen to happy music and look at a happy face, that face would seem happier than it would have if you had seen it before you heard happy music. And listening to sad music, makes a sad face sadder. This is also what I think happens when we watch animated characters who do not look like us but who bear faces that sink and float our emotions, cued by the film’s musical scoring.

In fact, music is so intricately entwined to our consciousness that it can distract us from whatever it is we have to focus on. “Work productivity” for instance, certainly appears to suffer if you listen to music at the same time. You can feel less distracted if there are no lyrics in the music that you are hearing. It is best not to listen to music at all when you want results from the work you are doing.

But in situations where you must constantly work with competing unpleasant noise such as machine sounds (sorry but not your colleagues’ blabber), then listening to music could save you from your work by keeping you alert. This reminds me of a cigar factory in Cuba who keeps their workers interested by hiring a storyteller who narrates stories to an audience of assembly line workers.  It also reminds me of a video of an actual surgery where the surgeons listen to music as they do the drilling parts in their procedures. Music and stories are ways to keep our humanity if we have to struggle with route work conditions.

Most of all, if the alien has to stay in my planet and get along, that alien has to consider music as essential because with us humans, music strings us all to give us a feeling that we are connected. This is why those concerts where you all are swaying and tapping and humming to the same music always gives you the “we are the world” experience before, during and even after the musical extravaganza. Rhythm could even synch the heartbeats of those listening to the same music.

It is no accident that music comes from the word “muse”. It is the ultimate muse with all the nine that the Greeks imagined, and even more. It is poetry, lyrics, dance, narrative, love, comedy, tragedy, sacred, and global or even cosmic.  It is also Quincy Jones and James Ingram writing deeply and more than once in your soul, that you did your best but it was not good enough. It is the once named Cat Stevens setting your first steps out of your bed to the rousing sound of a morning that has broken. It is Jessye Norman’s Ave Maria by Gounod, seeping through your otherwise unsacred soul. It is Leonard Cohen, revealing to your own irreverent soul that there is “a blaze of light in every word and that it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah.”  We come home to ourselves – our deeper, better selves with music. If an alien cannot figure that out, then Houston, we have a problem. – Rappler.com