Something You Should Know
The Many Ways Music Affects Your Brain & How Safe and Effective Are Your Meds?
Thu, 08 May 2025
Which side is your good side? You know, the side of your face you point toward the camera when someone takes your picture. We all have a good side. And I bet I know which one yours is. https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/24/which-side-is-your-good-side-here-comes-the-science/ You are exposed to a lot of music every day. Sometimes it is music you seek out and want to listen to as well as music that plays in the background – in stores, in elevators, in a doctor’s office. All that music affects your brain in interesting ways. Here to explain how is Sara Leila Sherman. She is a musician and educator, who studied and pioneered innovation in music as a tool for learning and personal growth. She is coauthor of the book Resonant Minds: The Transformative Power of Music, One Note at a Time (https://amzn.to/4jDM6Aq). Many prescription drugs do amazing things to help people. Still, there are frequent stories of drugs that go wrong. They either don’t work or they turn out to cause harm or even death. Isn’t the FDA supposed to make sure that doesn’t happen? How do bad drugs get approved? Is the process broken? Here to offer some great insight into this is Jerry Avorn, MD. Who is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He created a leading research center at Harvard to study medication use, outcomes, costs, and policies and has written hundreds of papers that have appeared in medical literature as well as opinion pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is author of the book Rethinking Medications: Truth, Power, and the Drugs You Take (https://amzn.to/4lRlT2E) Many people look back fondly on the good old days. Were they really that good? For some, the past seems so much better than the present, and they love to reminisce fondly about a better and simpler time. Listen as I explain why the past looks so wonderful to many of us and just how good it really was. https://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/08/why-we-long-for-the-good-old-days-why-they-never-really-existed-marianne-stenger/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Which side of your face is your good side and why?
So do you know which side of your face is your good side? The one you like to point towards the camera when someone's taking your picture. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. If you've never taken the time to really determine which side of your face is the good side, I can tell you that it's probably the left side.
Researchers from Wake Forest University studied the faces of male and female college students and took note of their personal preferences, and they almost always said the left side. The researchers say there's a reason most of us are drawn to the left side. That side of the face is controlled by the right side of the brain, which governs feelings.
As a result, the left side of your face will usually show a greater intensity of emotion. This is also a difference that painters have seemingly known about for centuries. Go to any museum and you will notice most portraits depict a person's left side. And that is something you should know. Whether you realize it or not, music plays a role in your life. You hear music more than you think.
Get in your car, go to the store, go to the mall, go to the doctor's office, watch TV, go to the movies. There will be music playing in all those cases. And then there is the music that you intentionally listen to because you enjoy it. Well, what effect does all this music have on you? And can you use music in an intentional way to actually help you to improve your life?
Or maybe music is just something pleasant to listen to to fill up the silence. Well, I think what you're about to hear about music and how it affects you is going to surprise you. My guest is Sarah Layla Sherman. She is a musician and educator who has pioneered innovative approaches to use music as a tool for mindful learning and personal growth.
She's co-author of a book called Resonant Minds, The Transformative Power of Music One Note at a Time. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.
So let's start with how much music do we hear? How much do we listen to?
70% of Americans listen to music for three to four hours a day. So then when we think of music and how much we're consuming music anyway, that's a lot of hours. But the idea of intentionally using music to help with our focus, our cognitive functions, our emotional awareness, community building, we don't necessarily put the thought into that in our everyday lives. And so that's what...
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Chapter 2: How does music impact your brain and emotions?
Absolutely. But I have to ask, do you like that music or do you find, you know, the idea of the masseuse and the waterfall and the flute music? To me, that doesn't resonate with me. So it's almost makes me a little anxious instead of relaxed. Do you actually find that you are more relaxed when you hear that type of music in that setting?
It's a good question, but it's almost as if if the music wasn't there, I'd think something's wrong. This person doesn't know what they're doing because they're not playing the mandatory flute music that I so expect to hear.
OK, so I'm going to answer your question and then you just spurred something else that I love talking about as music, as a cue in the absence of music and what that does to our brains. But so it's not always waterfalls and flutes. Different types of music do different types of things for us. Our brains start firing our neurons 300 to 500 milliseconds after it's exposed to music.
So that's faster than we have a conscious thought or before we can even recognize the melody. And what it does, it goes through our auditory cortex to our amygdala, so where we process emotions. So you're right that it makes you feel something, but it doesn't just have to be that because music can help lower our blood pressure and our cortisol levels. And maybe it's Bach.
And in terms of reducing our stress levels and our cortisol, it usually is something with slower beats per minute, usually less than 80 beats per minute and long melodies and not words. Words tend to actually interfere.
But context seems to play an important role in it. And, you know, for example, going back to the masseuse and the meditation music and all that. So if you walk into the masseuse's place and, you know, the candles are burning and the lights are flickering or whatever. And, you know, and she puts on Def Leppard instead of the fluty, you know, waterfall music.
Even if I like Def Leppard, this is not the place, right?
Well, absolutely. Death Leopard is then music to motivate or to have a different side of our emotions activated. When we listen to different types of music, it interacts with our amygdala in different ways. So there is a part of our brain that has that section for focus and for kind of this calm music. And I think that's what you're talking about there. But then this other music
ignite something called a groove and a groove isn't just something that we think about when we're you know at a concert or a mosh pit a groove is actually a neurological term when our brain waves are synchronizing so if you think back to a concert or whatever it might be or death leopard when you're in a room with people listening to music that has usually 80 to 120 beats per minute which i imagine death leopard does
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Chapter 3: Can music be used intentionally for personal growth?
then it's not just in the background, which music never really is background because like I mentioned, our neurons are firing purposefully according to the music, whether we realize it or not. That's why if you're writing, it might be harder to write when you're listening to music with words. It might be harder to focus if you're listening to Death Leopard versus classical music.
And so that three to four hours is really staggering, but let's put some of that intention behind it.
You know what I really hate is the hold music. You know when they put you on hold for 20 minutes, but they play the same 30-second loop of music over and over and over again, knowing they know you're going to be there for 20 minutes? That is maddening. I would rather have silence than hear that thing for the 400th time.
So in the 1960s, this is one of my favorite stories, you know, switchboard operators. And the story of hold music on phones happened because a switchboard operator accidentally crossed the cable with the local radio show. And so the person on the phone was all of a sudden hearing the radio instead of being switched to where they were supposed to go. And so all of a sudden...
The hold music was patented in the 1960s. It still is under the same patent. And it's really become the signal now in our everyday lives of hold. You know, there's a 1989, there is a Cisco hold music. It's one of the most famous pieces of hold music out there. That's probably what you've heard on repeat. But there's all this research behind the type of hold music nowadays.
that certain businesses pick. If you're with an insurance company, they might select types of music, like we mentioned, to lower your stress levels or your cortisol. So I agree. I don't love hold music, but it's a signal. Because if you were met with silence, how would you know if somebody hung up on you or if you were disconnected from the call? Right.
Right, yeah, it very much serves as that, we're still here, we're just ignoring you at the moment, but we're still here. And you say in your book that only 1.4% of people listen to classical music. That's surprising.
In the world. So there are different statistics. The numbers are higher if you look at the UK and in Canada and America, but globally, which I think is important to look at. I think that there's been this shift of classical music. If we go back to Mozart, Mozart's concerts were...
for lack of better words, let's say raucous, where people cheered if they really loved this crescendo, which means the music gets louder and they would cheer. And he expected that. We have letters of Mozart writing to people and saying they applauded just like I knew they would. And then when it got really soft, I could hear silence and like I wanted.
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Chapter 4: Why do the good old days seem better?
I like that you chose the word classes up the place. So it already has to you also this level of sophistication associated with it, correct?
Yeah, just like in a restaurant with white tablecloths and classical music playing, you know it's going to be expensive. This is going to be an expensive restaurant because it's a classy place.
And so I don't disagree, but I think, again, then it puts this barrier. I like to think of the fourth wall and classical music in particular, breaking that fourth wall of what our expectations are at a concert or performance. I run a classical music concert series called Mozart for Munchkins, and it's an interactive experience. So we'll do that.
We'll play the flight of the bumblebee, but we'll encourage the kids to buzz around like bumblebees. Or we'll play Bach, and we encourage this element of breathing with Bach to it. And it's amazing what a one-year-old and a two-year-old can do when we give them the space to be themselves and to experience this serious music, they don't have to get it, but they can feel it.
And the more exposed they are to them, it becomes taken down from this pedestal, almost as we often think about it, like you said, this fancy restaurant or hotel or whatever it might be. And it can become more integral into accepting music like the death leopard, whether you like it or not, but it also then breaks this barriers of our expectations of it. And it's not put in a box.
Here's classical music over here for when I do these fancy things.
Well, you know, I've never really thought about this before, but there is an expectation. Like if you go to, into a fancy restaurant and there's music playing, it's likely something classical-y, or if not real classical music. Because what I'm thinking about is there's a grocery store not far from here that I go to now and again,
And they don't play the music you would expect to hear, which is why I noticed it. I can't tell you what the other grocery stores play, and they're all playing music. I don't even notice it. But this place plays oldies from the 60s, and I love it, and I notice it.
But there is this expectation that you will hear certain music in certain places, and you will not hear certain music in other certain places.
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Chapter 5: How effective is the FDA in testing prescription drugs?
Instrumental music with a low amount of beats per minute that kind of keep us in this calm, grounded state. I love the oldies and I love that they do that. And so somebody somewhere is intentionally picking that soundtrack for that grocery store.
I'm always interested in how people get to like the music they like. And I imagine it has a lot to do with just the music you're exposed to in your home growing up or whatever. But I remember...
because I come from the radio, the music radio business, worked in music radio for a long time, and remember program directors at radio stations talking about this, about how they would play a song, they would choose whatever song, new song that they're going to play. If you play a song over and over and over again, people get to like it. It becomes a hit.
That's how hit records become hit records, is if it's played enough, people become familiar with it, and that familiarity turns into liking.
I love that story. And because it's, when I talked about cues before, it's the idea of something becoming, listening to it consciously and having it all of a sudden go into our subconscious. And so then, oh, actually I like this song or you've heard it enough times. You know this song, whether you realize how you've learned it to begin with.
And so it's the same if we think about buttoning our shirts or brushing our teeth or learning how to tie a shoe. It's this action that we purposefully focus on. It's something our explicit memory. We are trying to remember how to do this action. And eventually it goes into our subconscious, our implicit memory, and we do it automatically. And music... is exactly the same.
Think about songs from your childhood or when you hear a song and you can have a very vivid memory of what that's attached to. And it's because of the way you've listened to it however many times. Or if I sing this to you, after two notes, what is that song? Jaws. Yeah. Two notes. And you know exactly what song it is, but you didn't sit there and think, hmm, here's two notes. Here's Jaws.
It's because it has been ingrained from watching the movie. That song itself has become so used in pop culture that we have this association with it. So that absolutely makes sense that radio show hosts did this and that people were all of a sudden having favorite songs because it was prescribed for them.
on repeat and they were then having these associations maybe whatever they were doing and creating these positive memories while they were listening to it whether it was intentional or not maybe you can explain this phenomenon to me and i bet it's something that's happened to everyone listening to us talk right now if you were to say to me okay here is a song and you name the song and it's a song i know i've known it all my life
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