Adjust Up Your Health

Adjust Up Your Health.
The prayer of suspected benefits is long: It can soothe infants and adults alike, trigger memories, allay pain, backing sleep and make the heart beat faster or slower. "It," of course, is music. A growing body of scrutiny 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 subject at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Music has been shown to assist with such things as pain and tribute but "we don't know for sure that it does improve our (overall) health".

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

From the scientists' angle "it's one thing if people say, 'When I listen to this music, I warmth it.' But it doesn't tell what's happening with their body." Researchers sine qua non to prove that music not only has an effect, but that the effect translates to health benefits long-term.

One confusion to be answered is whether emotions that are stirred up by music really affect people physiologically, said Dr. Michael Miller, a professor of prescription and director 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 joyous music can refurbish blood flow and perhaps promote vascular health. So, if it calms someone and improves their blood flow, will that metaphrase to fewer heart attacks? "That's yet to be studied".