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Huron and his colleagues were gratified to find significant differences between the groups’ assessments of their likely academic performance. Those who had listened to the happy banjo music tended to overestimate their marks, while the Eno listeners were much more realistic. “It’s almost as though when people listen to sad music, it’s a way of grounding themselves,” Huron concludes.

Whatever effect music may have on us, it is a form of “drugs without the drugs,” Huron says happily. In subsequent research, he has suggested clear links between our responses to instrumental music and human speech. He describes a distinct progression in the emotional experiences of subjects who reported their feelings upon listening to sad music: first an empathy akin to what they might feel hearing the voice of a loved one in pain; then a flood of associations in the “acoustic cues,” triggering memories (the proverbial “they’re playing our song” phenomenon); and, finally, rumination or “sad thoughts.”

Huron also sees a possible evolutionary link in his findings. When we respond to music with chills down the spine, for instance, we may be experiencing something similar to what a mother would feel hearing the cry of a lost child: We become hyperalert and focused, with adrenaline at the ready, prepared to do whatever it takes to find and protect the child.

When music makes us cry, Huron points out, our tears are filled with the hormone prolactin, which is integral to the essential human bonding experience of breastfeeding and which women produce in greater quantities than men. This, along with the release of hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin, mimics the well-being we feel in the most intense moments of connection with others—nursing an infant, having sex, being praised.

“It’s biology wrapping its arms around you and saying, ‘There, there,’” he says.

In an abstract for the article “Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music That Makes Them Weep?” Huron writes, “I suggest that the pleasure of musically induced weeping arises from cortical inhibition of the amygdala, and is linked to the release of the hormone prolactin. . . . Weeping shares a deep kinship with laughter, frisson (‘chills’), and awe (‘gasping’)—responses that philosopher Edmund Burke called the ‘sublime emotions.’ ”

Of course, this paradoxical dynamic—seeking out a “sad” song in order to feel “happy” in the end—doesn’t work for the depressive. The tears may flow, the heart rate might change, but there’s no “There, there” there.

For research into the brains of the mood disordered, I had to turn from musicologists to the work of Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry who runs the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Davidson is known for his study of the brain’s plasticity, its ability to change and to heal. He and his colleagues have found that the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus (all parts of the brain that respond to music) in depressed people show clear differences from those in normal subjects. And one result might be, in one of my favorite phrases ever, “context-inappropriate emotional responding”—tears at a tulip festival, for example. But his research also represents good news: Brains can change, for the better, through many therapies, including antidepressants.

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