So how does music relieve pain? Despite conducting research on this very subject, I cannot give you an exact answer. Yet, the results of my studies points in two different ways music can impact how much pain we feel.
To understand how music affects pain, we must first explore pain. Pain is multidimensional. The first is the sensory-discriminative dimension; this is the actual sensory feeling of pain. Next is the cognitive-conscious; this dimension is how we think about pain or it’s meanings to us. The third is the emotional-affective dimension of pain or the emotions associated with pain. Finally, there is the autonomic-endocrine-motor which is how our body responds to pain. So when I stub my toe, I feel the sensation of pain, have thoughts about the pain, feel emotions like anger, sadness, or anxiety, and different systems in my body respond to the pain. For this blog entry, I am going to focus on the sensory-discriminative dimension of pain.
When a painful even happens, the pain receptors (nociceptors) send a signal to the brain. The same thing happens for all of our senses: seeing, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. The brain actually can only process so much information at one time so it picks and chooses what it will attend to. Like right now, you may not notice the feeling of your seat under you but your sensory neurons are sending that info to the brain. Your brain was ignoring it, until I said something about it. So the brain can choose to ignore sensory information, including pain. An example of this would be when you go skiing. You fall and hit your knee early in the day but keep skiing. Your knee does not hurt all day until you are driving home. That is because the brain chooses to attend to the other sensory information of the wind in your hair, the cold on your cheeks, the scenery, the sounds of the snow, etc. and tune out the pain. But when you had less sensory information or were bored, your brain chooses to attend to the pain.
Music therapists use the same process when we use music to reduce acute pain. By making the music experience compelling enough, the patient’s brain will tune into hearing the music, watching the music therapist play, the feeling of playing a maraca, and focusing on playing on the beat, and tune out the pain. It does not take away all the pain every time but music therapy can help to reduce the amount of pain a patient feels and to reduce the duration of the pain.
Some people say we distract our patients from pain. That is not really accurate. What music therapy and pain literature indicates is that we are using the processes in the brain to reduce the amount of pain that the brain attends to.
Next time, I will explore the theory of how music therapy can affect the emotional-affective dimension of pain.
Weisenburg, M. (1994). Cognitive aspects of pain. In P. D. Wall & R. Melzack (Eds.),
Textbook of pain (3rd ed., pp. 275 – 289). New York: Churchill Livingstone
Annette Whitehead-Pleaux, MA, MT-BC