#1- It is SUFFICIENTLY COMPLEX to keep your interest during repeated listenings. "Junk" music gets boring after you've heard it a dozen times. How often have you listened to your 1995 Prince or Madonna album, eh? Are your first Britney Spears and Back Street Boys CD's starting to get dusty? They will, absolutely. By contrast, once you get into it, you'll listen to any Bach or Mozart composition for the rest of your life. Some jazz music, because of the nature of complex improvised melody lines qualifies. However, much jazz music, that offers nothing new and seems rather rubber stamped ("easy jazz"),- the same old "gnat notes" solos, fails to do this.

This quality of complexity stimulates brain activity in the frontal lobes and between the right and left hemispheres. Actually knowing how to play an instrument furthers this increase in brain function- Research has shown that musicians have much more dense fibers in the corpus callosum than non-musicians, and this allows for much better special intelligence (recognition of abstract and spacial forms and constructs) among other things. Musicians further process music equally in both hemispheres, unlike non-musicians who mostly only "hear" music with half their brain.

#2- Brain Music is NEW. This is a rather tricky criteria, as anything we become familiar with loses this quality of newness after repeated listenings. For example, if you are very familiar with certain classical music pieces, these have lost this quality. Beethoven's 5th Symphony sounds fantastic the first few times you actually sit down and concentrate on listening to it. But it loses that rare "WOW!" peak thing that happens in your brain when you encounter a brand new experience. You have to go a while and "forget" much of it before your neurons fire off in the same way- and they never quite do if you've heard it a dozen times. To get your brain to grow and learn- and go those pleasure synapses to fire full force- you have to keep EXPLORING. Your music and listening experience must be infinitely varied, and always searching out new things.

The brain craves-it NEEDS- new information. Grow or Die. Mother nature has in fact set up a reward system in the limbic portion of our brain. When you process new information, like a new movie, new scenery, NEW MUSIC, this sets off neurotransmitters in the pleasure centers in your brain, and you FEEL GREAT. By constantly exposing yourself to new things, your brain gathers data that helps you to survive in this world. Listeing to new music is one of the easiest and most pleasurable ways to help your brain grow and work more efficiently.

True Story: A guy goes swimming every day, 10 laps. At first he loses weight. But he never changes his routine. After a year, he continues to swim 10 laps- and starts gaining weight. Moral of this story? Move on!

If you keep listening (doing) to the same old thing--- the brain punishes you with BOREDOM. This is Mother Nature telling you GROW NEW BRAIN CONNECTIONS. New studies have shown that students who learn new music do far better in school in all subject areas than non-musical students. It is not too difficult to imagine all of the other areas of life- not so conveniently tested- that learning or listening to new music helps.

Music that uses new combinations of harmony and rhythm not common in typical classical music or over-played pop radio music qualifies. Much world music with odd time signatures and unusual scales and harmonies qualifies for us westerners. Naturally, if you grow up listening to Eastern Indian music for example, you would have to listen to The Beatles or something "unfamiliar" to achieve the same NEW BRAIN STIMULATION EFFECT.

#3- Positive and creative lyrical content is important in vocal music, although there is a certain amount of give to "negative" lyrics. The Beatles songs, for example, generally reflect on positive and upbeat things, with the occasional negative lament of "my baby left me I'm so blue" kind of thing. But overall, with the combination of complexity and variety of sounds and melody, and mostly upbeat lyrics, the general effect is a very positive brain trip. On the other hand, music with lyrics of a constant negative and depressing nature, along with little variety in harmony and melody, along with harsh acoustic distortion and dissonant harmonic and acoustic elements - it doesn't take a genius to figure out this will make anybody depressed. If you feed your mind and brain a steady diet of "Life Sucks" messages, guess what you're gonna' start feeling all day... Lyrics also need to put a new twist on things to tickle and stimulate your frontal lobes and anterior amygdala. Just saying the same old thing in the same old way doesn't make it.

QUESTION FROM A WEB VISITOR: