The Musical Brain
Music Affects What You Think, Who You Are, and What You Feel
The impact of music on the human brain is only beginning to be fully understood. Recent research has revealed surprising insights into how music affects everything—from our ability to reason and solve problems to our emotions and memory.
Coming later this month: SPI will record Melanie Ambler, whose work is at the intersection of music and science.
Melanie is a professional cellist and fourth-year medical student at Stanford School of Medicine. For nearly a decade, she has studied and applied the science behind music’s impact on the human brain in clinical settings in the United States and abroad. In her SPI talk, she will describe how music profoundly benefits patients nearing the end of life, assists those suffering from a broad range of medical conditions, reduces stress and anxiety, and reshapes the developing brain.
This recording promises to be an excellent resource for educators, parents, and students alike.
Background
Melanie attended Brown University, earning a degree in Neurobiology with honors in 2019. She then moved to Caen, France, as a Fulbright Fellow to pursue a master’s in Neuroscience and study the effect of music on patients with dementia. She received the Rosalind Swenson Enrichment Award from the French Fulbright Commission for her work providing virtual concerts to nursing home patients in France during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, she also performed one-on-one virtual concerts for over 200 critically ill patients as a “musician on call” with the non-profit Project: Music Heals Us.
In 2024, Melanie founded Musical Rounds, a music and storytelling project for patients in palliative care.
Some of the topics we’ll cover:
How can scientists measure the impact of music? What do brain scans show?
What kinds of music produce these effects? Is one genre more effective than another?
What strategies can be used to maximize music’s impact?
What is musical memory, and why is it so powerful?
Pictured: Melanie at Stanford, making her “Musical Rounds,” a fitting image of a deeply engaged and accomplished musician who has been playing the cello since she was eight years old, and as a 10-year-old cellist on Valentine’s Day.
Engaging with music as a child. Why it matters.
Music not only activates existing regions of the brain—it also fosters the creation of new neural pathways. When children learn an instrument or deeply engage with music, their brain forms fresh connections between areas responsible for hearing, movement, memory, and emotion. This process, known as neuroplasticity, suggests that musical training can enhance skills far beyond music itself, leading to improvements in language, problem-solving, and coordination.
In short, music acts as a catalyst for building a more interconnected and adaptable brain.
Melanie’s recording will be uploaded to our website in March where you’ll find it cross-referenced under Arts/Music and Sciences/Human Biology.
About Story Preservation
Our Mission: Story Preservation Initiative believes in the transformative power of story to connect people around our common humanity and create a better future.
Our Work: We are a leading producer and online distributor of original, content-rich audio-based narratives for K-12 students. SPI stories are the raw materials of history, roadmaps to scientific discovery, and windows to the minds of artists and skilled tradesmen and women.
What We Achieve: SPI brings listeners into personal contact with extraordinary people whose stories engage their hearts and minds, imparting content knowledge and fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking as they open doors to possible career paths in professions associated with the arts, sciences, humanities, and skilled trades. We are fully open-source.
When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.
Please consider making a tax-free donation to SPI. We are an open-source educational nonprofit dependent upon the generosity of contributors. Every bit helps us keep the stories and projects coming.
Visit us here www.storypreservation.org
Watch for our OVER THE MOON STUDENT ART GALLERY CALL FOR ARTISTS in our March newsletter.