Hi everybody. Welcome to the Kirk Cameron Show. Today we’re having another dangerous conversation. James, I love having these talks with you. Some people don’t know we are father and son. Uh good thing you know you uh in the looks department you take after your mother. Thank God.
poof and uh and we have these great talks which is which is just always fascinating to me. So what are we talking about today? So I had a conversation with a friend and uh we were just talking back and forth about music and if music has a deeper effect than just dancing to it in the car or singing the lyrics on our lives. So, I kind of did some research on that and there’s a study um that came out in 2011 by McGill University that studied the effect on the psyche of humans that music has on them. Yeah.
Um, and they discovered that when we listen to music that has uplifting lyrics and like happy melodies, like kind of like a feel-good song, it releases something called dopamine in our brains. And dopamine is the happy drug. It’s what you get when you have a first kiss with your girlfriend or you like your child is born.
It’s like, oh my gosh, dopamine floods into your brain. So, when you’re listening to songs that are happy, you’re getting that dopamine response. They did the same study and in contrast with dark music, um music that is talking about violent things, um it has sad melodies or unsettling tones, it releases something called cortisol into your brain.
And cortisol is your body’s primary stress hormone. And it causes discomfort, anxiety, and has led to a lot of depression. like depressive thoughts or suicidal ideiations. So that study was super interesting to look at what’s coming into our ears through music actually is releasing chemicals in our brain which affects how we feel. There was another study done by the journal of personality and social psychology and it involved 500 college students who listened to songs with violent lyrics.
