Adjust Up Your Health

Adjust Up Your Health.
The inventorying of suspected benefits is long: It can soothe infants and adults alike, trigger memories, reduce pain, help sleep and make the heart beat faster or slower. "It," of course, is music. A growing body of probe has been making such suggestions for years. Just why music seems to have these effects, though, remains elusive.

There's a lot to learn, said Robert Zatorre, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, where he studies the keynote at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Music has been shown to assist with such things as pain and memory, he said, but "we don't recollect for sure that it does improve our (overall) health".

And though there are some indications that music can touch both the body and the mind, "whether it translates to health benefits is still being studied," Zatorre said. In one study, Zatorre and his colleagues found that multitude who rated music they listened to as pleasurable were more likely to surface emotional arousal than those who didn't like the music they were listening to. Those findings were published in October in PLoS One.

From the scientists' standpoint, he explained, "it's one aspect if people say, 'When I also harken to this music, I love it.' But it doesn't barrow what's happening with their body." Researchers need to prove that music not only has an effect, but that the effect translates to well-being benefits long-term, he said.

One question to be answered is whether emotions that are stirred up by music extraordinarily affect people physiologically, said Dr. Michael Miller, a professor of medicine and commander of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

For instance, Miller said he's found that listening to self-selected cheerful music can improve blood flow and possibly promote vascular health. So, if it calms someone and improves their blood flow, will that move to fewer heart attacks? "That's yet to be studied," he said.