How does music affect your brain? Write a list of effects.
Music can have various effects on the brain:
Emotional response: Music can evoke emotional responses in individuals. Different aspects of music, such as rhythm, melody, or instrumentation, can dictate the emotional expectations people have while listening to music .
Social bonding: Listening to music or engaging in musical activities with others can increase bonding and attachment between individuals. It has been observed that when people bounce in sync with someone else to music, it raises levels of oxytocin, an attachment hormone, in both brains, creating a sense of bonding .
Arousal and attention: Music can affect our arousal level, making us become more awake or engaged. Certain types of music can stimulate the brain and increase attention .
Cognitive development: Research suggests that learning an instrument or receiving musical training may have positive effects on cognitive abilities and academic performance. Studies have shown a correlation between musical training and higher IQ or academic achievement .
Cultural identity: Music plays a significant role in shaping cultural identity and can help create a sense of belonging within a community or group of people occupying a specific territory .
Predictability and anticipation: The brain seeks to predict what will happen next when listening to music. As the brain tries to predict how a musical phrase will unfold, certain parts of the brain associated with reward and pleasure, like the caudate nucleus and nucleus accumbens, become active .
Learning and neuroplasticity: Learning music involves neuroplastic changes in the brain. For example, intense practice can cause the brain to remap specific body parts, resulting in changes in movement patterns .
Enhancing learning: While the "Mozart effect" theory suggesting that listening to classical music makes you smarter has been debunked, musical training may have indirect benefits on learning by making school more enjoyable, increasing attendance, and reducing the likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior .
Neuroscientific research: The relationship between music and the brain is an active area of research, with studies using various techniques such as EEG and fMRI to explore the neural correlates and physiological responses to music .
These effects are based on scientific research and observations, but it's important to note that individual experiences with music can vary.
(someone): It's being more and more studied. And it's fascinating now because now we have, in certain places, these kind of theaters that are built to study people's physiology while they're experiencing you know, concerts or films, you know, where you can look at galvanic skin response, which is a measure of how sweaty your palms are, breath rate, you know, respiration rate, your heart rate, et cetera. So we can actually see, we can track people's emotional, at least the physiology of their emotions as they're looking at films or listening to concerts. And, and, and so, yeah, I mean, what, you know, it's, it's essentially what you think you, we would find, which is that these things are very powerful. Um, and you can look at different aspects of music pacing, uh, the, the, the types of instrumentation used, et cetera, that can dictate what kinds of expectations people will start to have, right? Like you have an ominous theme and what you see is a rowboat on a lake in this foggy, right?
Sean Carroll: You know something's going to happen.
(someone): Something's in the water. But if it was a calm, pleasant, you know, kind of like you're about to have spa day music, then you think, oh, it's just calming.
Sean Carroll: because the brain wants to predict things. That's a very good clue for predicting what's going to happen. Yeah. Speaking of the neuroscience of it, forget about just sports or soundtracks. Do composers know about the neuroscience?
(someone): I don't understand that either. But I think part of it, I mean, imagine a sports event without music, right? Like take all the, you know, chanting and, and, you know, music playing and all that out of it. And do you still have the same, reaction? I don't know.
Sean Carroll: Well, I mean, it goes, I presume that there's a longstanding relationship between having a football game and having a marching band at halftime.
(someone): Well, yeah. And even, even the taunts and the shouts and we will, we, you know, whatever, or like, yeah, exactly. Yankees suck.
Sean Carroll: I'm a Yankees fan so I can say that. And the, what I, the example I think of when this topic comes up are soundtracks for movies and TV, right? Which always, which are brilliant and important and, A little manipulative. I feel like I'm being manipulated.
(someone): I'm totally manipulative. Yeah, I mean, imagine the psycho scene with like, you know, pleasant, you know, the wheels on the bus, right? It's not scary at all.
Sean Carroll: Right, right, right, right. I mean, how much have we studied the neuroscience of that?
(someone): It's being more and more studied. And it's fascinating now because now we have, in certain places, these kind of theaters that are built to study people's physiology while they're experiencing
(someone): And then you go to a Kiss concert, and you see the same thing. Or maybe an Eagles game, right? So there's something about this whole adhering to and this interplay between adhering to these expectations, which is really what culture is all about, and the emotional component to culture and music. And really what we've just tried to do is look at that in an algorithmic way. you're forming algorithms in your brain anyhow, and because of artificial intelligence, we've been able to scale that and say, okay, what might an individual audience, how might they respond to this? And maybe help the industry a little bit that way. And let's face it, the industry is already using algorithms, and the algorithms that they're using are not human at all. We're looking at something that's a lot closer to the human experience, which is where the brain is processing the auditory signal.
Sean Carroll: I think that's a fascinating answer and actually very different than what I expected, which is great because, of course, I'm not very good at playing the devil's advocate here. I think that we should be trying to understand what goes on in the brain when we do these things. But your emphasis on culture is really interesting. So I presume that when we think about how music impacts the brain, there are universal aspects that everyone, you know, responds to things like rhythm and melody, but then there's also culturally specific aspects, and it sounds like you spend a lot of time separating those out, or at least taking the culturally particular aspects very seriously.
(someone): Yeah, I think that's a really important part of this.
(someone): can't regulate them yet and you know there's all these things of everything's you know self-esteem is coming into play but we're pimply and gangly and everything right?
Sean Carroll: I don't know why there are people who think that those were the good times in their lives but they exist.
(someone): So one thing that's great about music is that it's a powerful social glue so when you listen when you when you bounce in sync with someone else to music, you actually raise levels of an attachment hormone called oxytocin in both of your brains, and that makes you feel more bonded. So there are some clever little experiments where you'd have people bouncing in sync with each other to a particular piece of music, or in sync with the experimenter, and then the experiment finishes, and thank you very much, and here's the debriefing sheet. Oh, let me just walk you to the elevator. And on the way to the elevator, you drop a pencil. How likely is the person to pick it up? Turns out that if you bounced in sync, much more likely. Is that a reproduced result? Well, and it's been reproduced in toddlers, nonetheless. So toddlers will also be more likely to help an accidentally dropped toy if they were bounced in sync by the adult or by the adult's friend, but not if there's a neutral person in the room that seems to be a stranger. So there does seem to be some kind of attachment that happens where you tend to then associate the person that you were in sync with, literally, physically, as part of your tribe and people who you're out of sync with as another tribe.
(someone): Yeah. I mean, something scientific in the sense that it was like literally a one page paper from 1993 from UC Irvine. That's all it takes. Yeah. Of like, you know, 30 undergraduates. What it was is people had, you know, the scientists had three conditions. They had these undergraduates perform ultimately a bunch of the IQ tests, the subtests, like the spatial reasoning, you know, subtests, you know, where like, here's a picture of a geometric shape. Here are some blocks, you know, make the blocks look like the picture, that kind of thing. So they had three conditions. The first condition was where they played Mozart's piano sonata, I believe, and for 15 minutes before they were asked to do these tests, or they sat in silence, or they listened to relaxation tapes. Now, which of those three conditions do you think is more arousing? Yes, so they were probably slightly more awake, slightly more engaged, and they performed better, slightly, on these tests. If you had given them a shot of espresso or, you know, in subsequent replications of this kind of work, you know, reading a Stephen King chapter was just as arousing. Blur was just as arousing.
Sean Carroll: And we're using arousing just in the sense of heightened senses.
(someone): Oh, yes. I mean, just more awake, right? I don't mean sexually.
Sean Carroll: Right. Maybe that's true, but OK, depending on the song.
(someone): And you can keep dancing forever, right? And, you know, and so anyway, so and then, and then you add on to that spoken word and, you know, an outlet for people to express themselves and, and so forth. And so all of a sudden you can see that how, you know, that, that, that this kind of genre of music evolved out of a sense of, you know, trying to engage with your community and trying to make your own situation better.
Sean Carroll: And of course, there's a flip side, right? Like we already said, there are fight songs and fight songs can be good if it's just, you know, my sports team versus your sports team. But there's also martial music. I mean, there's you can stir up the emotions of a populace using music.
(someone): That's right. Exactly. And, you know, even in the book, I mention Bono, who is my favorite artist growing up, basically not wanting to sing Sunday Bloody Sunday because he was worried it was going to incite more violence. I mean, this is like, you know, he was genuinely worried about this. Well, maybe he's not crazy. I don't think he is, right? I think that there are times when you can exactly stir up people's emotions enough where they go out and then they riot. I mean, you do the same thing with, you know, for some reason, sports ball games, right? I don't understand that either. But I think part of it, I mean, imagine a sports event without music, right?
(someone): Culture is something that, you know, sort of is a biological necessity of evolution. It's something that we develop in the place where we are. So it kind of helps bond us to each other and it kind of creates, this helps like mold this emotional bond that we have to help the cohesiveness of a territory, right? And so one of the functions of music throughout time has been to kind of give an identity to a group of people who occupy a certain territory. There's also, of course, symbols, or you have sports teams, or all these things that identify you, your accent, your customs, how you greet each other. And these things are things that we learn through exposure. And so what we've tried to do is to model that sort of learning, that learning is statistical. And because of the just that happens to be, and I think that this is actually not intentional, but it has benefited us through our evolution. that the place where we kind of develop these statistical expectations through exposure is very proximal in the brain, in the limbic system, to our emotional centers, to the parts of our brain that process reward and that process these, you know, like the dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and these feelings of belonging togetherness. And, you know, one of the functions that music has served in the past is to bond us together and we're so passionate And because of this, it allows us to overcome the fear of, God forbid, we have to defend the territory. You see Braveheart, and you see them painted in their faces and that sort of thing. And then you go to a Kiss concert, and you see the same thing. Or maybe an Eagles game, right?
(someone): And then you see the 80s that come back. And these are cycles because of when we're younger, really the music around us is not self-selected. This is during that critical period where our implicit systems, those unconscious responses to kind of the statistical regularities and characteristics of music are developed. And that's really based on the decisions of the music our parents and our family, our family members choose, right? And then so we, that kind of sets this implicit standard. And also from which, you know, the next generation of music comes from, then the listeners who are growing up, they're ready for kind of this certain amount of expectation violation and surprise. And I think that's really interesting to think about, because when those huge identity moments of the teenage years, those years when you're really forming your social bonds and relationships, I think that's where we started with talking about the power of music and how it's so important there. It's it's interesting that in terms of popular music, you really see the 13 to 19 or 20 year olds. They're the ones who are consuming and who are targeted the most popular music. And it may be that and we see this consistent trend of those top songs having these patterns of expectation violation and surprise because they're kind of at a set point of, you know, they've learned kind of the rules and what's going on around them in the universe and now they're ready to take that to the next step and we see these kind of cyclical patterns over decades.
Sean Carroll: There is a set of words I hear over and over again when you're giving your videos. You do this wonderful set of videos on what makes this song great. And often you will hear, well, because we go from this chord to this chord or we modulate from this key to this key, it gives us a sense of excitement or resolution or nervousness or fright or whatever. How systematic is that? If I said, I would like something that makes us feel melancholy, does that translate in your mind into a certain chord change, or is it just you fool around to see what makes that work? Both. Okay. I believe that.
(someone): I think you come up with this stuff by seeing what makes it work, but there are certain things, certain type melodies, there are certain minor keys, like Aeolian, which is natural minor, that has a very melancholy sound to it. And the note in the natural minor, beyond the minor third of the chord, the flat six, which is one of the important notes of the scale that gives the Aeolian mode or the natural minor scale its flavor, because it leads you down to the fifth, as opposed to the Dorian mode, a Dorian melody that has a natural six and that leads you up to the flat seven. And when you have notes that are leading down to really strong anchor tones in the scale, the root or the fifth of the chord, so a flat second pulls you down to the root and a lot of metal uh, is uses a lot of flat two chords and things like that. It has a really strong, um, pull back down to the tonic as a dark sound.
(someone): It can make us attend to school more and ultimately help society.
Sean Carroll: But that's learning an instrument or, or, or being trained in music. We, you said earlier, if I'm remembering correctly, that being exposed to classical music when you're young will affect you later in the sense it'll make you more likely to appreciate classical music when you're older. You're saying it doesn't help you with any higher cognitive capacities, but maybe being trained as a musician does.
(someone): Yeah, exactly. I don't know that listening to Mozart growing up is going to make you smarter. I think that if you listen to Mozart growing up, you probably have a family that already has the heredity and the SES that will put you there. I can't say that the actual listening to music is a bigger factor than those other huge factors.
Sean Carroll: Yeah, and then there's the final section of your book, which is fascinating about the social aspects of music. I mean, you make the point, which is a good one, but one I never thought about, that most music is truly social unless you are all by yourself performing a piece of music that you wrote yourself, right? Right, right, right. Other than that.
(someone): Right. And even then you still have, you probably still have the idea that there is a listener, maybe somewhere, you know, but yes, I mean, I was like truly trying to see, is there any exception to this rule?
Sean Carroll: Even if it's just a volleyball with a head written on it. Right, exactly. Yeah.
(someone): It's being more and more studied. And it's fascinating now because now we have, in certain places, these kind of theaters that are built to study people's physiology while they're experiencing you know, concerts or films, you know, where you can look at galvanic skin response, which is a measure of how sweaty your palms are, breath rate, you know, respiration rate, your heart rate, et cetera. So we can actually see, we can track people's emotional, at least the physiology of their emotions as they're looking at films or listening to concerts. And, and, and so, yeah, I mean, what, you know, it's, it's essentially what you think you, we would find, which is that these things are very powerful. Um, and you can look at different aspects of music pacing, uh, the, the, the types of instrumentation used, et cetera, that can dictate what kinds of expectations people will start to have, right? Like you have an ominous theme and what you see is a rowboat on a lake in this foggy, right?
Sean Carroll: You know something's going to happen.
(someone): Something's in the water. But if it was a calm, pleasant, you know, kind of like you're about to have spa day music, then you think, oh, it's just calming.
Sean Carroll: because the brain wants to predict things. That's a very good clue for predicting what's going to happen. Yeah. Speaking of the neuroscience of it, forget about just sports or soundtracks. Do composers know about the neuroscience?
Sean Carroll: But neuroscience, you got a PhD in neuroscience, you're still practicing research in neuroscience, right?
(someone): A little bit, a little bit. Yeah, the kind of research I do now is much more kind of applied research that I find interesting that I think might help me become a better performer or me become a better teacher or somehow that I could do that nobody else can do rather than, you know, having a big lab where I'm running subjects all the time.
Sean Carroll: No, you quickly become an administrator and it's a full-time job, right?
(someone): Yeah, exactly. So I don't do that. But I'll tell you about one study that I'm kind of excited about. So, you know, I've recently gotten interested in how technology can change our minds and can help us become more efficient, if not less efficient, as in the case of most technology, it seems, makes us less efficient as we try to multitask. And so, you know, I was really skeptical of this idea that you could stimulate your brain into becoming a better pianist. I don't know if you've seen some of these ads, but there's a company called Halo Neuroscience that made this headset that's commercially available and it's transcranial direct stimulation and it's supposed to essentially stimulate motor cortex, put it into what they call a hyperplastic mode, which means it's kind of more open to change and then you practice your instrument or you work on some kind of athletic skill and that's supposed to increase the efficacy with which you can train. And so we're examining that. We're trying to see whether that's true for our students at the Conservatory of Music.
(someone): The caudate nucleus. So yeah, it's part of the reward system. And essentially, you can think of it as the wanting part of the brain. So in the anticipation of something pleasurable or actually something awful, you can see more dopamine activity in the caudate nucleus. And the caudate nucleus is also like if you lesion it, then animals have a hard time learning new kind of habits and skills. So patients with Parkinson's disease, for example, or Huntington's disease have less dopamine in the brain and the caudate is affected. Anyway, so they have habit learning problems. So the caudate really, when it comes to music, we see it active during the building up of tension part of a musical phrase. And then once you get the release of tension, if you get the chills maybe, or some other kind of reaction, we see a big spike in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is the liking part of the brain. So if the caudate is the wanting part of the brain, then nucleus accumbens is the liking part of the brain. So it actually gives you the sense of pleasure as opposed to the pursuit of pleasure. Anyway, the Caudate is really fascinating because it's been implicated in a lot of human behaviors that are hard to understand. For example, people who have anorexia, we think now it might be partly to do with a habit of not eating so that they find eating aversive. We see an overactive caudate in the sense that it's not just a desire to be thin, it's just that eating is unpleasant. It becomes habitually unpleasant.
(someone): Now, they didn't see changes in IQ or changes in parts of the brain that we think are really responsible for higher intelligence. But, you know, that's because I think it just wasn't enough time.
Sean Carroll: So I do think... The practical limitations of the study get in the way at some point.
(someone): Yeah, I mean, I do think it's compelling. If you're only studying music to make yourself smarter, I think probably you're going to burn out eventually. But I think music is something that is enjoyable and stretches you and puts you out of your comfort zone. And one of the great statistics that I love to quote is that it makes you more likely to go to school. So in LA, for example, there have been a number of studies of kids who are at risk, who generally are not expected to attend school very often. If you put a school music program in, they're more likely to show up because they want to play in the band. They like it. It's more fun to go to school. Now, you keep kids in school and off the streets, they're less likely to commit crimes and end up in juvie or ultimately in jail. Now, you take one child and you turn them around so they don't end up going to jail, that pays for 10 years of a music teacher's salary. There you go. Right? So I think that in that sense, it can make us all smarter because it can make us make school more enjoyable. It can make us attend to school more and ultimately help society.
Sean Carroll: But that's learning an instrument or, or, or being trained in music.
(someone): that have the types of facilities where they have an auditorium with neurological and physiological metrics for an audience and musicians on stage. McMaster University in Canada and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which actually before Before I joined Seeker Chord Laboratories, I was going to head over to Germany as a postdoc. And then when we realized that this kind of research, because we could kind of lead the ship, steer the ship on exactly what kind of music we choose, and artists, and how we design our studies, that's definitely on the forefront of our research goals, is further exploring the interactions both between band members and also the audience as well.
(someone): And what, you said you've gotten so far as to get to officious management for that?
(someone): Scott and I were attending the Northeast Music Cognition Conference, I believe it was back in 2017. I think it was the week between my wedding and my honeymoon. And I gave a talk there. And afterwards, a big Phish fan up in Massachusetts came up to me. He's a medical doctor. He uses Ronald Hirschberg. who looks at the clinical aspects of music and how it can affect in rehabilitation of military, military vets. And he had been he was a huge fish fan. He had been like, record you'd recorded with a group of 100 people, some background vocals and told me this whole story from 1992. And like an old an old church. And he said, he often he's like, all I could think about now I didn't mention fish or anything during my talk, it was focusing on jazz as as we've been talking about.
(someone): It can make us attend to school more and ultimately help society.
Sean Carroll: But that's learning an instrument or, or, or being trained in music. We, you said earlier, if I'm remembering correctly, that being exposed to classical music when you're young will affect you later in the sense it'll make you more likely to appreciate classical music when you're older. You're saying it doesn't help you with any higher cognitive capacities, but maybe being trained as a musician does.
(someone): Yeah, exactly. I don't know that listening to Mozart growing up is going to make you smarter. I think that if you listen to Mozart growing up, you probably have a family that already has the heredity and the SES that will put you there. I can't say that the actual listening to music is a bigger factor than those other huge factors.
Sean Carroll: Yeah, and then there's the final section of your book, which is fascinating about the social aspects of music. I mean, you make the point, which is a good one, but one I never thought about, that most music is truly social unless you are all by yourself performing a piece of music that you wrote yourself, right? Right, right, right. Other than that.
(someone): Right. And even then you still have, you probably still have the idea that there is a listener, maybe somewhere, you know, but yes, I mean, I was like truly trying to see, is there any exception to this rule?
Sean Carroll: Even if it's just a volleyball with a head written on it. Right, exactly. Yeah.
Sean Carroll: Right. Maybe that's true, but OK, depending on the song. I mean, maybe, right?
(someone): Yeah. But certainly in terms of just your general whether or not you're awake or asleep, your general arousal level of your brain. Yeah. So that was the original Mozart effect. And that led into this whole, like, baby Einstein, like, you know, play music for your baby, it'll give them better IQ, which most of it is totally not supported by the research. But if you look at sort of musical training, there is a relationship between the extent of musical training and ultimately academic success, if that's really what you're interested in, or performance on IQ tests, which we all know are an imperfect measure of intelligence. But what we see is that kids who have three years or more of individual music lessons tend to show higher IQs or higher academic achievement than kids who, on average, don't have that kind of exposure. Now, you've got a confound here, potentially, of socioeconomic status because, on average, kids that can afford to go to have music lessons are going to be, on average, richer than kids who can't. But there are a couple of nice controlled studies, like there's one study in particular out of Boston Public Schools where they, you know, randomly assigned kids to two groups. One was an instrumental music group, one was a kind of just group music classes, and they did start seeing changes in the brain after only 15 months of musical training that map on to what we would have expected. Now, they didn't see changes in IQ or changes in parts of the brain that we think are really responsible for higher intelligence.
Sean Carroll: Well, yeah, people will get frustrated. Exactly. So I want to talk about music and learning. And this sort of has two sides to it, right? One is that we learn music, right? So what is the neuroscience of how we learn music? Let me just mention one fact that I read in your book, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. The musicians, certain musicians, play their instruments so much that when they're playing, you know, two of their fingers always move in the same way in synchrony together and their brain begins to forget that they're two separate fingers. Their brain remaps. And I always heard that the other way around, you know, how the brain can sort of remap extra parts, but I had never thought about the brain forgetting that there's a part there.
(someone): Yeah, this is the dark side of neuroplasticity. It's called focal dystonia. So essentially where you have, you know, a particular body part, which now, you know, your brain has trouble decoupling, you know, this particular and we're still learning exactly how this works but the idea for I think I think that's getting traction is that in some musicians like you perform the same pattern over and over again or you train your your hands to sort of be in sync in a certain way and then all of a sudden your brain actually remaps your somatosensory cortex as that being you know just as you said one finger rather than two fingers and so now it's very hard for you to decouple
(someone): Not if you know how to do it. Exactly. And so, you know, yeah, when opera singers try to sing musical theater without knowing what they're doing, they will hurt themselves, even though they have this like, you know, apparently really great technique, but you know, musical theater singers who then turn around and try to sing opera again can hurt themselves, but if they, but not if they're doing what they've been trained to do.
Sean Carroll: Can you pinpoint what the difference is between singing in musical theater and singing in opera?
(someone): Yeah. I mean, you know, in a nutshell, it's sort of belting. So it's essentially, it's where you're putting most of your timbre. And remember, in the musical theater, you're largely amplified. So you don't have to project as much. And so, you know, the way, essentially the way that you, how much pressure you put through your vocal cords and that is different, right? You know, if you want to, put it down to that. The way you use your resonance and the way you control your breath is going to be slightly different.
Sean Carroll: And what about the other way around? We can learn music and there's the claim that music helps us learn. There's the Mozart effect, right? And this was actually based on something scientific and then it got a little bit out of control.
(someone): Yeah. I mean, something scientific in the sense that it was like literally a one page paper from 1993 from UC Irvine.
(someone): We've done our series of studies with both electroencephalography in terms of correlational work. I've also had the opportunity to use transcranial direct current stimulation, which is actually placing two electrodes in someone's scalp noninvasively and sending a weak electrical current into the brain, in which you kind of flip the neuroimaging paradigm on its head. with EEG or fMRI research and neuroimaging, what you're looking for is to see what happens in the brain when I either have two groups of participants, like novices or experts, or I have two different tasks, such as performing a memorized melody or an improvised melody. With with the stimulation, what we look for, we say, if we target this brain area and try to modulate the activity in an inhibitory or disinhibitory kind of way, do we see a difference in the output of the behavior? Yeah. And so we were able to use both of these methods to look at this hypofrontality and movement to posterior activity. I think it's important to say the difference is really between the experts and novices. So two different groups are variables. the number of gigs or how much experience you'd had in jazz. But I wouldn't just, I wouldn't be so quick to say that, um, you know, we're relying only on system one when you're, when you're an expert in system two, when you're a novice, because, um, my theory is I haven't tested this yet. And I would love to do this experiment is if we look at a smaller timescales, specifically when, when errors happen,
(someone): It's mind numbingly boring in that sense because there's nothing interesting about it. It's like, you know, eating white bread. So, um, so I think that, you know, that, that means that you listen to it differently because so then when you, when you listen to a really great jazz player and you know, they're playing my funny Valentine for example, or some other really famous melody, but you like barely recognize the melody in it, but you know where it's going and it all kind of fits in. It's like this magical puzzle that you're, you know, listening to and it's really great. So yeah, so I think that again, I think it depends on your genre and depends on within the genre how, you know, how old the genre is, how much it has these established rules, how much composers have had to push against these rules to create something new and so on. And all this is to say that it harnesses what I think of as the brain's you know, fundamental trait, which is it wants to predict the future. Yeah. Right. Like our memory is not about the past. It's about giving us the ability to create a potential future and see whether our behavior is going to make us survive or kill us. Right. So, um, that's really what ultimately music does. It, it harnesses the brain's desire to predict the future. Um, and so, you know, you create tension as a musician for an ultimate release. If you stop the piece before the tension is released, I mean, unless that's really an Right, it's annoying.