Hi, TED Talks Daily listeners. It's Louise Hugh. We're back with week two of our collection of episodes all about the brain. The next five episodes will cover everything from mental health to falling in and out of love. Today, we're learning the way music, not just listening to it, but playing instruments, lights up our brains and makes us smarter.

It's from educator Anita Collins's TED-Ed lesson.

Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain?

On the outside, they may look calm and focused,

reading the music and making the precise and practice movements required.

But inside their brains, there's a party going on.

How do we know this?

Well, in the last few decades,

neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs

in understanding how our brains work by monitoring

them in real time with instruments like fMRI and PET scanners.

When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks such as reading or doing math problems,

each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed.

But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks.

Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once as they processed the sound,

took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm,

and then put it all back together into unified musical experience.

And our brains do all this work in the

split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along.

But when scientists turn from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians,

the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain

in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout.

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