(CN) — Does your favorite music make you feel good? Relaxed? Inspired? Happy? Nostalgic? Well, new research indicates that your playlist of your favorite tunes can also work to actually ease our perception of physical pain.
In a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Pain Research on Wednesday, researchers outlined a test in which people were first asked to think about and then select their two favorite songs of all time — the tracks they would bring on a desert island — with the only requirement that they be longer than three minutes and 20 seconds.
The participants were poked with a thermal contact probe on their inner forearm, which induced a sensation similar to a hot cup of coffee between 104 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit being held against their skin for 15 seconds.
They then listened to their two favorite songs back to back, at which point researchers asked them rate the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain they experienced, as well as the music’s “pleasantness,” their own “emotional arousal,” and the number of “chills” or frisson they experienced.
The researchers found that listening to their favorite music not only reduced feelings of discomfort in the participants, but also the intensity of the pain they felt, especially if the music was described by the study subject as bittersweet or moving.
“We found that reports of moving or bittersweet emotional experiences seem to result in lower ratings of pain unpleasantness, which was driven by more intense enjoyment of the music and more musical chills,” Darius Valevicius, a doctoral student at the Université de Montréal and one of the authors of the study, said in a press release.
The paper doesn’t exactly define what “musical chills” are, but they seem to be related to tingling sensations, shivers, goosebumps, frisson, or other kinds of emotional responses of connectedness the participants had to the music they picked.
The researchers suggest that the participants’ preferred music could induce a kind of hypoalgesia, or a decreased sensitivity to pain, where the thing that caused the painful stimuli is disrupted and reduced before the conscious brain perceives the stimuli as pain.
When researchers tried to replicate the effects of participants’ favorite music with chopped up “scrambled” edits of their favorite music, silence, or relaxing instrumental music provided by a musical therapy company with titles like “Jamaicare,” “Légende Celtique,” and “Reggae Calédonien,” the participants’ did not feel as relieved as they did after listening to their preferred music.
That finding indicates that the solace people found in their own favorite songs is probably not just because the music is some sort of distraction from the pain that’s causing the hypoalgesia, Valevicus wrote.
“Pain is a significant societal and individual burden, and there is a need for alternative ways to relieve it without over-reliance on pharmacological analgesics, which may produce side effects and dependencies. Music may be a viable non-pharmacological intervention for those undergoing surgery, surgical recovery, or with chronic pain conditions,” the study's authors wrote.
The scientists say further research must done on whether the results of this study can be replicated when people are exposed to non-thermal pain, and to delve further into the specific musical attributes or emotional responses that are responsible for the hypoalgesia effect and the actual neurobiological underpinnings of the effects of listening to music that’s important and meaningful to a person and pain.
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