Music’s abil­ity to affect our moods is well known. New research is pop­ping up which looks into the pain relief aspects of lis­ten­ing to out favourite jams. Dr. Laura Mitchell of Cale­don­ian Uni­ver­sity in Glas­gow has been study­ing to what extent, if any, music can help us cope with pain. From the looks of her pub­li­ca­tion list, she has been research­ing this for a few years now. Her lat­est paper is “An inves­ti­ga­tion of the effects of music and art on pain per­cep­tion”. I’d like to read it but I can’t jus­tify buy­ing the arti­cle at this point. I’ll link to CBC’s cov­er­age for you dear read­ers, which gives a run­down on the research.

Peo­ple reported their abil­ity to dis­tract them­selves from pain more than dou­bled if they were lis­ten­ing to their favourite music, while their per­cep­tion of the amount of pain they felt fell significantly.

Mitchell, who’s been study­ing art and pain man­age­ment for eight years, believes it’s the emo­tional asso­ci­a­tions of music that lessen human per­cep­tion of pain.

“It’s the dis­trac­tion of music that you love and you have a rela­tion­ship with. And you’re so emo­tion­ally tied to it, you’re so emo­tion­ally engaged, that it can actu­ally take the pain away,” she said.

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