Why can a song raise goosebumps, retrieve a memory or make someone move before consciously deciding to do anything?
A 2019 episode of WIRED’s Tech Effects examines how music affects the brain by sending host Peter Rubin and musician Fantastic Negrito into functional magnetic resonance imaging scanners. The resulting images reinforce an important point: Music does not live in one tidy corner of the brain.
How Music Affects the Brain
Older pop-science explanations often placed language in the brain’s left hemisphere and music in the right. Modern neuroscience presents a more complicated picture.
The auditory cortex processes features such as pitch, rhythm and timbre. Meanwhile, motor systems respond to the beat, memory connects sounds with previous experiences, and reward systems help produce pleasure and anticipation. Reading music also involves visual processing. Performing it adds movement, planning and touch.
In other words, there is no single “music center.” Listening and performing recruit networks distributed throughout the brain.
Why Music Can Give You Chills
The video explores frisson, the shiver or rush that sometimes arrives during an especially powerful musical passage.
Research has connected intense musical pleasure with the brain’s reward system. One study found that dopamine activity differed during the anticipation of a musical peak and the pleasure of experiencing it.
That does not mean everyone responds to the same music or experiences chills at all. Musical reactions also depend on memory, expectation, familiarity and personal association. A song’s failure to produce goosebumps is not a scientific verdict on its quality.
Music Training Changes the Brain, but It Is Not a Cheat Code
Learning an instrument requires the brain to coordinate hearing, sight, movement, timing, memory and sustained attention. Over time, that training can produce measurable changes.
A longitudinal study of childhood music training found stronger performance in musically relevant auditory skills after two years. Researchers also observed related changes in brain development.
However, the findings do not justify the sweeping claim that music lessons automatically make children smarter. The researchers found stronger neural activity during one inhibition task, but they did not find corresponding differences in behavioral performance. Music education can shape the developing brain without becoming a shortcut to higher intelligence.
What Happens During Improvisation?
WIRED also places Fantastic Negrito in a scanner while he improvises. The episode describes part of the prefrontal cortex as shutting down, but the underlying science is more precise.
In an earlier functional brain-imaging study of jazz pianists, researchers found decreased activity in lateral prefrontal regions associated with conscious monitoring and control. At the same time, activity increased in a medial prefrontal region, while sensorimotor systems remained busy organizing the performance.
The study involved only six highly trained, right-handed jazz pianists, so it does not prove that every creative act follows the same neurological pattern. Still, it offers a biological foothold for the familiar experience of creating more freely after the inner critic gets out of the way.
Music as a Route Back to Language
The video also examines melodic intonation therapy, which uses melody and rhythm to help some people with aphasia recover elements of speech after brain injury.
Music therapy is not a miraculous cure or a playlist someone can prescribe at home. However, a 2024 systematic review found evidence that structured music therapy could improve repetition and some cognitive abilities in people with post-stroke aphasia. Researchers also called for larger studies and clearer treatment standards.
WIRED’s video works because it treats music as more than decorative sound. Listening, anticipating, remembering, moving and improvising each draw on different systems. Neuroscience can map those responses, but it cannot fully account for music as a human possibility. We make songs, but we did not make the minds that imagine them, the bodies that perform them or the ordered world of sound from which they are formed. For Christians, calling creativity a gift does not diminish human achievement. It makes it more remarkable.