A fascinating new study shows how music affects our imagination — and how it just might help you feel less lonely too.
One night in the middle of the pandemic lockdowns, writer Stephan Joppich was feeling particularly lonely and isolated. He tried taking a walk, brewing some tea, meditating. Nothing helped. Then he put an album by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi on repeat. Finally, he was able to relax and drift off.
“Music seemed to be the only thing that provided comfort and relief,” during this period of intense loneliness, Joppoch wrote on his blog.
Maybe you prefer hip-hop or metal to classical piano, but Joppich’s experience is intensely relatable for many of us. Who hasn’t felt lost, alone or heartbroken and turned to music for comfort? But what’s going on in your brain when those notes hit your ears? Why does music soothe our loneliness?
A new neuroscience study offers an intriguing answer. It also suggests a way entrepreneurs and others can use their favorite tunes to get through some of their toughest days.
Music regulates our moods
It won’t come as news to either music fans or scientists that music can help regulate your mental state. A variety of both research and anecdotal evidence shows that particular styles of music can affect our thinking, boosting productivity, creativity, concentration, or mood.
Music has been shown to impact behavior too. One survey found, for example, that when people listen to more music at home they’re more social, lingering over meals longer and even having more sex.
But what about when you don’t have anyone to be social with? How does music help us endure periods of loneliness? To find out, a team led by Steffen Herff, a neuroscientist at the Sydney Music, Mind and Body Lab at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, came up with a clever experiment to shed some light on the question. The results were published in Scientific Reports.
How our tunes keep us company
The researchers recruited 600 volunteers from around the world and asked them to picture a straightforward scenario, traveling towards a mountain. No additional details were given to guide their imaginings. Half the volunteers listened to European folk tunes, some with lyrics and some without, while daydreaming about their journeys. Half did not.
Afterwards, the scientists asked the study subjects to describe what they imagined in detail. They used various algorithms and human annotators to analyse the differences between the imagined journeys of those who sat in silence and those who listened to music. But I bet you can spot the difference just from some AI-generated illustrations of the stories provided by the researchers.
AI-generated art created by Jessica Stillman
It doesn’t take a doctorate in neuroscience to notice the difference. The mental imagery of those who listened to music was full of people and social connection. Their descriptions were peppered with words like “friend,” “village,” and “together.” Those who listened in silence mostly undertook their mental journeys alone.
“This suggests music can indeed affect social thought,” write Herff and his collaborator, University of Sydney doctoral candidate Ceren Ayyildiz, on The Conversation. “The effect was stable regardless of whether listeners’ understood the lyrics or whether there even were lyrics in the first place.”
“Our results suggest music can indeed be good company,” they conclude.
Get through lonely times with music?
It also suggests that Joppich’s instinct to reach for his favorite playlist when he was feeling isolated and alone made sense. Music is clearly not a solution to long-term loneliness. But when I asked Herff if music might help us weather lonely moments, he endorsed the idea.
“The probability of imagination to contain social interactions in our experiment is more than three times higher when participants listen to music, compared to silence. It can make you feel understood and fill you with a sense of connection and belonging,” he replied.
This insight couldn’t come at a better time. The Surgeon General warned that America is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic years ago. Chatter about our isolated lifestyles and lack of community has reached a crescendo. Meanwhile, the pile of research showing loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking, and cause physical symptoms that mimic physical hunger, like low energy and heightened fatigue, continues to grow.
So is there a particular kind or style of music that helps the most in combatting loneliness? Not according to Herff, who instead stresses following your own instincts.
“People’s relationship to music is a very personal one. What might work for one person, might not for another,” he said, citing another recent study of his that showed people opt for very different types of music when they’re feeling lonely. For some people music might not even be much help at all.
But it certainly doesn’t hurt to try. “In my mind, music’s potential lies in its ease of access and how personalised it can be. So why not give it a shot and experiment with what works for you? The worst thing that can happen is that you end up listening to some music,” Herff concludes.
You might even find you feel a little less lonely after you spend some time listening to your favorite music.
