Few people understand music’s powerful frontal lobe influence. All music enters the brain through its emotional regions yet some types of music also stimulate the frontal lobe responses.
Some kinds of music tend to produce a frontal lobe response that influences the will, moral worth, and reasoning power. Other kinds of music will evoke very little, if any, frontal lobe response, but will produce a large emotional response with very little logical or moral interpretation.
Music appears to have both general and specific brain effects. Listening to music appears to favorably balance the frontal lobe function in depression. By actual EEG measurement, music decreases over-dominant right frontal lobe activity in chronically depressed individuals. However, medical research also raises serious concerns about certain types of music.
Thus, depending on the type of music, its net influence can be either beneficial or detrimental—depending on whether it predominately stimulates the frontal lobe or the “lower” emotional centers. Music therapists tell us certain types of music, such as rock with its syncopated rhythm, bypass the frontal lobe and our ability to reason and make judgments about it. Evidence suggests that it, like television, can produce a hypnotic effect.
Source