"guest Commentary': What's Behind The Subliminal Power Of Music

When I was working at emergency rooms in New York, we would often see heroin addicts who came in nearly dead from overdoses. As they struggled for breath, we would feverishly prepare injections of Naloxone. This drug binds to opium receptors in the brain. When heroin is bound to these receptors, one experiences an "opium high." But Naloxone is a spoiler. It kicks the opium off the receptor, ties it up, and produces no high. Result: 60 to zero instantly.
The patient would then be able to breathe, but only rarely did the story end there. More often than not, a patient would come up swinging, upset that we ruined his or her last high and unbelievably unconcerned about the near-death experience. Powerful stuff.
So what does this have to do with the music business? Jokes aside, plenty. The same receptors that bind opium also bind endorphins, a class of natural opioids found in the brain that seem to play a pivotal role in the way we experience music.
Experiments have shown that if you give Naloxone to a group of people and ask them to listen to their favorite music, it suddenly becomes an intellectual exercise. After Naloxone negates the effect of their natural opioids, the intensity of emotion seems to diminish. People really do get "hooked on a feeling."
And what a powerful feeling it is: Music talks to us, and we talk back. The grimaces and contortions made by performers and listeners alike are direct responses to music that moves us, a way for the subconscious mind to respond to music's message. And, like spoken and written language, music can impart information. Extensive research has shown that exposure to certain kinds of music improves visual and spatial reasoning, memory, and learning.
What's more, the effects of our favorite music are long-lived. Music begins in the mind of its creator and ends in the daydreams of the listener. Its power lies in the ability of a single musical piece to be different things to different people‹to become ours, to connect directly to our innermost dreams and desires.
Many songs that ring up large sales not only produce endorphin highs but relate so well to listeners' emotional lives that people create strong and long-lasting associations between those songs and other events and people in their lives. The songs become anchors. They trigger a flood of emotions and images: some from experience, some from daydreams. These images have the ability to instantaneously produce very powerful changes in emotional states.
This is the unique selling proposition of the music industry‹a CD lets consumers obtain desirable emotional states of their own choosing on demand. In this way, music provides a powerful, unique service.
Is there a demand for this service? Absolutely. In a world that moves faster and grows more