A new research has found that listening to music could make the brain pay more attention and work better.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that people listening to music have peak brain activity between when the music stops and starts again.
The finding may help scientists understand how the brain sorts out inputs from the chaotic world around it.
People listening to music engage the parts of their brains involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory, researchers found.
Scientists used magnetic resonance imaging to see what parts of the brain are working during different activities. The study used short symphonies from an obscure 18th century composer to capture the attention of the people in the study.
"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.
"I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon added.
The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.