Music and our Brains

In today's episode, we will read an article together, work on new vocabulary, improve our comprehension, and more. So let's get started. You are listening to episode 141 of English with Dane. Hit it.com in the health section, and I thought it was an interesting read. I hope you find it to be interesting too. The article is called What Music Reveals About Our Minds.

What we'll do, locaremos, what we'll do, is read it together, highlight some tricky language, and make sure we understand it in its entirety. We'll then do a little vocabulary recap at the end to make sure you don't forget. The link to the article is in the description of the episode, and if you are subscribed to the listener list, you will have received, so let's go. What music reveals about our brains, how listening to music helps your brain.

Music is a powerful tool to access information about ourselves. Two recent studies are offering new insight into how our favorite tunes are linked to memories and our personalities, and how those connections can make lives better. It's a KT sound, linked. Let's continue. Hearing a favorite, familiar or throwback song can instantly transport you to another moment of your life, bringing back details in startling clarity. And it's not just a fanciful feeling.

There has long been a beneficial association between music and patients with Alzheimer's or dementia. Repeatedly listening to music that is personally meaningful has been found to improve the brain's adaptability in patients with early Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment. Mild means moderate, by the way.

Listening to music with a special meaning stimulated neural pathways in the brain that helped them maintain higher levels of functioning, according to Michael Thought, who was senior author of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto. It was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in November. These songs held unique significance, like music the people danced to at their wedding, and led to an increased memory performance on tests.

The findings could support the inclusion of music-based therapy in the treatment of cognitively impaired patients in the future. Changes were most notable, más notables, in the prefrontal cortex, known as the control center of the brain, where decision-making, social behavior moderation, personality expression, and the planning of complex mental behavior occurs.

When the patients heard music that was personal to them, it powered up a musical neural network connecting different regions of the brain based on the MRIs taken of the patients before and after listening to the music. This differed from when they heard new, unfamiliar music, which only triggered a specific part of the brain tuned into listening.

There were only 14 participants in the study, including six musicians, and they listened to specially curated playlists for an hour a day over three weeks. But these participants are the same ones from an earlier study that identified the neural mechanisms for preserving music-related memories in those experiencing early cognitive decline.

Whether you're a lifelong musician or have never even played an instrument, music is an access key to your memory, your prefrontal cortex, says Thought, who is the director of University of Toronto's Music and Health Science Research Collaboratory, and a professor at the Faculty of Music and Temerti Faculty of Medicine. He also holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Music, Neuroscience, and Health. It's simple. Keep listening to the music that you loved all your life.

Your all-time favorite songs, those pieces that are especially meaningful to you. Make that your brain gym. The research is a promising beginning that could lead to music therapy applications with a broader purpose. Alright, let's do a vocabulary check. First, let's talk about insight. The sentence was two recent studies are offering new insight into how our favorite tunes are linked to memories and our personalities. Insight means accurate and deep understanding.

So if something offers new insight, it offers us a new deep look at something. That's a collocation, by the way, to offer insight. You'll often see those words happen together. That's what a collocation is. Next we have the word triggered. The sentence was, this differed or was different from when they heard new unfamiliar music, which only triggered a specific part of the brain tuned into listening. The word trigger means gatillo.

The verb trigger means to cause something to function, so in this case our brains. New unfamiliar music only triggers certain parts of our brains. Now let's talk about two words that you maybe haven't heard before. Startling, as in startling clarity, and fanciful, as in a fanciful feeling. Startling is an adjective that means very surprising or remarkable. The verb to startle means to surprise or to frighten too. If someone is easily startled, they are easily scared or surprised by things.

Jumpy is perhaps a more colloquial way to say it. So the article mentions that listening to a familiar song can, quote, transport you to another moment of your life, bringing back details in startling clarity. So it's very surprising or remarkable how vivid the details are. The other word in this section was fanciful. It's not a word that is used that commonly, but it means over-imaginative or unrealistic.

The article says that this feeling we get of being transported back to another moment in our lives is not just a fanciful or unrealistic feeling. There's actually scientific evidence to back up this claim, para respaldar, to back up this claim, estafimación. To finish, let's talk about the verb to highlight. I know you probably know this one, but it's one that comes up a lot, yet I rarely hear students use. When used as a noun, a highlight is an outstanding part of an event or period of time.

If you miss your favorite team's basketball game or football match, you watch the highlights later to see what happened. When used as a verb, it means destacar. You highlight something you want to draw special attention to. This one is useful when giving presentations at work, for example. It's super common to say something like, I'd like to highlight the figures from last quarter. Or something like that. You know what I mean. Everything you need to accent and highlight your changing look.

Alright, that's it for this episode of English with Dane. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show, and more importantly, I hope you learned something. Please give the show five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and don't forget to share it with your friends, coworkers, neighbors, or whoever you think would enjoy it. English with Dane on TikTok and Instagram for quizzes and random videos, and Englishwithdain.com for transcripts to improve even faster.

All right, talk soon. Bye-bye.