Andy’s Quick Hits (267): The Surprising Results Of How Music Reduces Pain in Your Brain

When you’re in pain any form of relief is welcome — we tend to immediately revert to pain killers but there are many other methods of, at least, reducing pain. I have recently reported on how meditation can reduce pain and the different mechanisms in the brain.

What you may not know, or may have intuitively used, is that music seems to reduce pain, and this has been well-documented dating back to the 1960s. Two new pieces of research just published show how this works in the brain and other influencing factors. Some of this is surprising.

First off, a recent piece by Zhou et al. tried to find the mechanisms in the brain. For this they used mice with inflamed paws and played different types of music or sound. I know you may be thinking that mice surely can’t differentiate between different types of human music, but many animals can differ between harmony and disharmony and respond positively to, for example, classical music. Some music is universal it seems.

These mice were exposed to harmonious music, disharmonious music, and white noise — a simple buzz of noise. And the results were surprising. What they found is that all three types reduced pain in the mice. Simply it seemed like it was noise rather than music. This may sound counter intuitive…