Listening begins at the subcortical structures, the primitive parts of the brain that engage with rhythms and contain the seats of emotion. It moves up to the auditory cortices on both sides of your brain, where you are listening for patterns, assessing tones, and intuiting structures and pitch. Meanwhile, if it's music you've heard before, your brain calls up the hippocampus, the center for memory, to access what you already know about that tune. Are you tapping your foot to the beat? Now your cerebellum's timing circuits are firing.

Playing calls even more forces into action. Your frontal lobes take up the planning of your motions, your motor cortex tells your body what to do, and your sensory cortex assesses the feedback from fingers, say, as they press those piano keys. Reading music fires your visual cortex. If you're singing, you're also engaging language centers in a variety of places in the brain.

Experiencing music, whether performing or listening, also fires emotional activity deep in the primitive regions of your cerebellar vermis and the amygdala.

So next time you're in the middle of a favorite song in chorus, take a moment to feel the power and beauty of your brain lighting up in every corner, practically. This is your brain on music.