For every music teacher you fire, you have to hire a hundred police officers

INTERVIEW

Professor of clinical neuropsychology at VU Erik Scherder has delved into the effect of music on the brain. 'Music makes solves tasks that you would do less well as a man of sixty because there is an age-related decline.'

Listening to music you love creates collaborations in the brain

Conductor Kurt Masur, who died last year, comes from the statement: “For every music teacher you fire, you have to hire a hundred police officers”. Erik Scherder - professor of neuropsychology, who has been loved by the Dutch television viewer since his touching TV lectures under the umbrella of De Wereld Draag Door - is too much scientist to endorse Masurs appealing one-liner without reserves. But in fact, he implies something similar when he points out that listening to music, and especially making music himself, contributes greatly to the development of empathetic ability.

That is because research has been done. Scherder: 'Gottfried Schlaug has shown that in children playing music, the connection bar between the two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, grows larger. These hemispheres will communicate better with each other as a result. And that's incredibly important.'
He grabs the plastic brain model on the table in front of him, pulls the two halves from each other, and points fingers at the cross section.

'Look, here. The bridging of the front, orbitofrontal, to the back is especially important for social cognition. So empathy. In musicians, you can see the volume of these types of track systems and increase sharply.'

Does it matter what kind of music is listened to or played?
“Listening about that, that's what literature is about. They have had non-experts listen to all kinds of music, classical, tonal and atonal, but also heavy metal. In those studies, heavy metal came out as anxiety and stress enhancing. Heart rate goes down and blood pressure rises. That's a clinical symptom of people who experience chronic stress for a very long time. So that music has a negative impact on your system - if you don't like it, at least.'

Scherder grabs his laptop and scrolls through the results. Fascinating sight. The longer the red line, the stronger the feeling of agitation in the listener. A long green line is a lot of joy. Scherder shows what classical music lines look like. A beautiful song by Schumann: very green, so a lot of joy. Arnold Schönbergs Erwartung: very red. By the way, Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata also looks pretty red. So the non-experts don't like that either.

'But if you listen to music you love, which can also be Beethoven or Schönberg or heavy metal, you can see very different values and that makes quite sense. If you don't like it, only the parietal lobe does it a bit at the back; the precuneus becomes active. If you like it, you can see all kinds of collaborations in the brain in the network, in which not only the parietal lobe, but also the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a role. And that's actually what you want.'