Table of contentsSummaryTheoretical summaryIntegration of evidenceSound processingMusical depth/complexityMemoryLearningNeuroplasticityConclusionBibliographySummaryWith advances in neuroscience, the ancient view of musical cognition has evolved and gained in popularity, because its countless benefits The effects of music therapy are beginning to manifest in various physical and psychiatric disorders. The obvious change in perception with music therapy is due to several subsystems at work, with the dopamine network being the oldest phylogenetically and most popularly studied. Although music has a deep-rooted connection to dopamine release, the extent of its importance, as well as its relationship to improving other cognitive abilities, is unclear. This article reports on the aforementioned phenomenon, addressing the roles of sound processing, musical depth, learning and memory, and neuroplasticity in the operating principles of music therapy and relating each concept to the dopaminergic pathway. The article originally hypothesizes that dopamine is the initial trigger leading to improvement in all other cognitive abilities, following music therapy. Although integrating previous research, it appears that dopamine release is based on a learning prediction error triggered by the temporal uniformity of music, which is strongly entangled with memory systems. Musical qualities, harmony and depth are positively correlated with memory and neuroplasticity. Additionally, dopamine release has also been shown to have a direct relationship with neuroplasticity. The article concludes, contrary to hypothesis, that dopamine release is the second messenger between memory systems and neuroplasticity, instead of the preliminary leader. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Theoretical Summary Music obviously dates back to about 42,000 years ago. Some suggest even earlier dates, where it was most likely used as a survival mechanism for further emotional engagement between infants and caregivers. However, as the child acquires skills throughout their education, higher level communication, such as language, is preferred as a more effective and accurate way to convey emotions. It seems plausible that music can remain limited to this function, but it retains its value because it also constitutes a means of releasing emotions, without the need to act on them. The ancient Greeks viewed music as either a purification of the internal soul (catharsis) or a representation of the external world (mimesis). Currently, we know that music provokes emotions in us both through learned contextual associations and through musical expectations acquired from statistical data. properties of musical structures. The integration of ancient and modern views of music has shaped the current level and way of using it in our daily lives, often beyond the scope of our consciousness. Music changes the way we perceive reality, an essential ability to adapt to our environment. Accordingly, music has been shown to affect the processing of visual emotions: for example, a neutral face appears happy to individuals listening to music inducing positive emotions, and the same is true for negative emotions. Perception is the subjective interpretation ofobjective reality that requires neuropsychological processes to encode, decompose and then reintegrate incoming information. As a result, music interacts with various regions of the brain, including non-musical areas, rather than being limited to one area. The scope of music's effect has become evident since the emergence of beliefs suggesting that illnesses could be cured through harmony and balance. This concept was born again from a clinical sense aimed at calming veterans of World War I and II suffering from PTSD. The positive effects were observed directly from the physiological responses, e.g. heart and respiratory rate, skin conductance, etc. Additionally, repeated demonstrations following music therapy have detected a reduction in perceived pain and anxiety in patients suffering from both psychological and physical disorders, through a cascade of subconscious activities; which has led to an increased use of music for therapeutic purposes. Studies on music cognition provide insights into the processing of musical stimuli in the brain, where the main contributing mechanisms are the dopamine pathway and neuroplasticity. However, the exact processes remain controversial. This essay explores the extent of the role of the dopaminergic system in the beneficial machinery of music therapy. Integrating Evidence Although musical experience causes us to differ in the myriad of individual and musical variables, fMRI studies have shown that all individuals share key regions of the brain when processing music: areas targeting movement, motor planning, attention and the auditory cortex. The neural circuit loop formed between the auditory and motor systems allows for the perception and production of sound. Additionally, a key concept in music cognition is that the brain finds emotional meaning in music and causes the release of dopamine in multiple brain regions, both at peak emotional levels and during anticipation of the moment. This neurotransmitter simply functions for reward and motivation, essential for the proper functioning of an individual because it represents a survival value. Animal and human studies have found that increased dopamine generates species-specific search and approach behavior for rewarding stimuli, including food, copulation, and aggression. Meanwhile, damage to dopaminergic regions of the monkeys' brains, particularly the nucleus Accumbens, demonstrated a marked decrease in motivation. Dopamine pathways are structured deep inside the brain; supporting evidence from phylogenetic studies suggesting that it is ancient machinery. This also explains why we can feel such powerful emotions with music. Music has a uniform rhythmic nature, which makes the ability to perceive temporal regularity essential, in the coordination of the movements it indicates. Neurological studies, examining the correlates of beat perception, have shown that listening to an isochronous rhythmic sequence induces activation in regions favoring the creation of anticipation of the next sound. Besides the release of dopamine in the case of a rewarding event, this also suggests that perceptual planning regions, i.e. the prefrontal cortex (PFC), are involved in music processing. Neurological research with patients suffering from disorders of consciousness has proven that even when patients are unconscious, the anticipation effect still stimulates the dopamine system. The essential verdict is that neither consciencenor attention are necessary to benefit from the benefits of music. Processing of sound This musical perception differs from the processing that the brain applies to sounds that are not music and which are unpredictable. When sound first enters the brain, the cerebellum processes the incoming sound wave in a primitive, low-level manner through its simple physical attributes to relay it to the thalamus, the executive center of the brain that makes sense of information. processed and decides what to do. The thalamus then communicates with both the hippocampus, the region responsible for memory storage, and the amygdala, responsible for negative emotions, to decide the next reaction based on the existence or not of semantic associations. . The brain categorizes sound into music through the interaction of low- and high-level processes. Dopamine release occurs if the association has a rewarding value attached from the memory. However, if the sound does not contain any semantic information in itself, this does not happen. If the sound is not uniform, it will not generate anticipation or a dopamine response. Studies of stroke patients with unilateral neglect showed that their visual attention improved better with classical music than with white noise, while both results were superior to silence. Other findings have also demonstrated that background noise alone can actually impair cognitive abilities. For example, it appears that speech sounds more like random noise, regardless of the phonetics of the language, and is harmonically more dissonant than songs. Further research indicates that cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort resulting from conflicting cognitions, can be alleviated by consonant music, while being facilitated by dissonant music. This implies that consonant harmony tends to trigger more dopamine responses. Further meta-analysis of music used in effective therapies, and comparing dopamine levels with both, could clarify the importance of the neurotransmitter. Although these results imply that the success of music therapy is not the result of hearing the sound, but is due to dopamine pathways induced in the brain by different qualities of music. Musical Depth/ComplexityMusic can also be classified according to depth, arousal, and valence. . Although the definition of depth seems rather vague, it is mainly related to the intellect and sophistication of complex music, such as classical, avant-garde, world beat and jazz genres. More and more research has revealed a positive correlation between intelligence and classical music. Intelligent people tend to choose to listen to complex music, while neurobiological evidence also supports the opposite: examining the brain activity of rats after listening to Mozart revealed "increased gene expression of BDNF, a neuronal growth factor, CREB, a learning and memory factor". compound and synapsin I, a synaptic growth protein.” Many similar studies have found that classical music induces high neuroplasticity. This effect has attracted much attention, called the "Mozart effect", and warrants strong recommendation in various contexts. Clearly, the association between intelligence and musical depth occurs via working memory (WM). WM has a limited capacity*, which can be increased by slicing and reorganization. The music is structured; therefore, it allows efficient cutting. This translates into emotional engagementmeaningful with music. Listening to complex music trains our ability to make sense of information that is more difficult to group and process, resulting in improved memory and attention skills that serve well for intelligent problem solving. Studies in mammals report that complex information stimulates brain output and neuron survival in the hippocampus, which also provides further clarification of the Mozart effect. There is no clear link between complexity and dopamine release, suggesting that the essence of music therapy may not lie in the dopamine system, but rather in neuroplasticity. However, a 30-minute session of standardized neurological music therapy (NMT) showed improvements in executive tasks and mood, without being able to replicate past improvements in attention or memory. The main finding that memory improvement appears to consistently track mood outcomes still implicates the important role of dopaminergic signaling in the behavioral improvements observed after music therapy.MemoryDorsolateral part of the PFC (DLPFC), the distinctive part of the Human primate brain allowing high levels of processing, plays an essential role in cognitive flexibility. This is a core function of WM and the central executive in particular, which monitors and controls alternative courses of action to adapt to changing goals. One study investigated the neural correlates of WM through a delayed match-to-sample task, where the subject had to remember the sample presented to match the comparison stimuli during the delay. The DLPFC was dismissed during the delay period, leading to the conclusion that the area is responsible for reactivation and reorganization to increase associative abilities. This is an important function because we inferred that dopamine release depends on the emotional semantic value of an item. Salimpoor demonstrated that as the value assigned to music increases, the dopamine system correspondingly strengthens its communication with the auditory cortex, making perceptual regions more strongly coupled to emotion and reward systems. Furthermore, value attribution also depends on past experiences and therefore the memory mechanism. Concordantly, NMT and group psychotherapies have been shown to manifest in increased cognitive flexibility, as well as improvements in measures of visual attention, verbal learning, complex verbal memory, memory complex visual and planning – all of which are supported by neural correlates. It appears that memory is the essential function that contributes to the release of dopamine on which neuroplasticity depends. As memory plays a vital role, it is worth mentioning its wonderful reciprocity with learning.LearningAs mentioned above, temporal perception creates anticipation, and therefore a release of dopamine. The formation of anticipation requires the acquisition/encoding of patterns, which is memory dependent. The activation pattern of dopamine neurons in the VTA (a mesolimbic dopamine subsystem) exactly reflects reward prediction errors (RPs), the mismatch between prior expectations and reality. This is the same mechanism that also explains reinforcement learning in artificial intelligence, the constantly improving accumulation of algorithms making it possible to target an event by obtaining feedback from the environment on the right or wrong nature of its own predictions. Minimize the error between].