Research Spotlight: Music and the Brain

One of the great things about NPCA Seoul is that students get to choose their area of research. We have two students who have chosen an interesting research question: how does music impact the brain?

Irene and Charissa came upon this question together at the beginning of last week. "Many people think of music as the nice thing that people can enjoy. But, we're more interested in the physical and psychological effects. We wanted to go deeper, beyond just the nice thing that people can enjoy," Charissa commented. Irene enthusiastically nodded her head in agreement. They then spent the rest of last week finding out everything they can about how music affects our brains.

Now what? That's what they've been doing today. Their plan is to expand their research and find out how music affects people's bodies with an interesting experiment. They are going measure people's blood pressure before and after listening to different kinds of music. "Ms. Baum suggested using blood pressure because it's a number and not dependent on people's opinions," Irene told me.

Irene and Charissa are really excited to continue their research. They will present their work visually on a poster or Google Slides. I, for one, am really excited to see their final conclusions!

#spotlight #music #brain