Airline squeeze: It's not you, 'it's the seat'

By Thom Patterson, CNN

Seating configurations are going through some changes that will directly affect passenger comfort, convenience and cost.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Airline seating changes will directly affect passenger comfort, convenience and cost
• Expert: Coach airline seats were designed using wrong dimensions
• Air passengers have multiple complaints about coach seating

Editor's note: The Traveler's Psyche is a five-week series focusing on travel scenarios that stir emotion. We're starting with frustration and will wind up on a happy note in June. This week we'll take a closer look at air rage, the TSA and people who love aviation.

(CNN) -- If you're on a flight -- especially a long one -- a coach class seat can be a chair of torture.

It doesn't take much these days to ruin a perfectly good airplane ride, CNN.com readers have made clear. It's a real buzzkill to try to walk down the aisle "with a bag on your shoulder, hitting everyone as you pass by," suggests user "Cajuncatdude." Commenter "Rosemeow" writes, "It's bad enough that about a quarter of the time, I have an obese person sitting next to me (sometimes on both sides) who doesn't fit into their own seat, crushing me."

And "MrsColumbo" complains about "people who don't even try to stand up without grabbing on to the seat in front and pulling themselves up. What is with that?"

Scoring a good airline seat

For something as seemingly simple as stuffing rear ends between two armrests inside a flying metal tube, it kind of feels like there's some anger up there.

See some of the comments here

And things could get even more heated. Changes are happening now, as major U.S. carriers look for new ways to pump up profits by either adding to or reducing the number of coach seats, increasing legroom or cutting the distance between rows.

You might call it a game of aeronautical chairs that will directly affect passenger comfort, convenience and cost.

Two experts with inside knowledge of the airline seat industry-- a vice president at a seat manufacturer and a nationally recognized expert in the study of body measurements -- recently talked frankly about some of the reasons behind the anger and discomfort.

Are the seats getting smaller? Closer together? Are passengers getting bigger? Are we getting angrier?

Well, no. Yes. Yes. And it's unclear.

Americans are getting bigger, says Kathleen Robinette, who's studied human body measurements for the U.S. Air Force for three decades.

But in general, the problem's "not you -- it's the seat," she says with a chuckle.

Since Robinette's first airline seat study for NASA and the FAA in 1978, she has a different perspective when she boards an airliner. "I always see all kinds of arms hanging out into the aisles. That means the seats are too narrow, and there's nowhere for the shoulders and arms to go except into the aisle because there's not enough room in the seat."

When "you keep getting your arm whacked by the cart as it comes down the aisle," don't feel guilty, she says. It happens to everybody. "And it's because of the seats."

Related story: How to score a good airline seat

And what about passengers grabbing the seat in front of them to pull themselves out of their own seats? Is that really a thing?

Airplane seating has come a long way since 1925, when German airline seats looked like this.

"It can be quite annoying," laughs Jeff Luedeke, a vice president at airline seat manufacturer TIMCO Aerosystems, maker of seats aboard Allegiant, Japan Airlines, RwandAir, and Spirit Airlines. Seat grabbing creates a challenge for designers, said Luedeke, who flies about a quarter-million miles yearly. "If the rows weren't so close together that would probably prevent people from grabbing the back of the seat."

In 1962, the U.S. government measured the width of the American backside in the seated position. It averaged 14 inches for men and 14.4 inches for women. Forty years later, an Air Force study directed by Robinette showed male and female butts had blown up on average to more than 15 inches.

"The seat is a revenue generator," Luedeke says. "Normally if you look at a 737 or A320 there are three seats on each side. If you wanted maximum comfort you could do two on each side -- and make the seats a lot wider. But with the reduced head count the operational costs don't work out."

But the American rear end isn't really the important statistic here, Robinette says.

Nor are the male hips, which the industry mistakenly used to determine seat width sometime around the 1960s, she says.

"It's the wrong dimension. The widest part of your body is your shoulders and arms. And that's much, much bigger than your hips. Several inches wider." Furthermore, she says, women actually have larger hip width on average than men.

The industry used the male hip as a seat measuring stick "thinking that it would accommodate the women too, but in fact they don't accommodate the larger women."

The result: Airline seats are approximately 5 inches too narrow, she says. And that's for passengers in the 1960s, let alone the supersized U.S. travelers of today.

Overhead on CNN.com: Angry fliers get what they deserve

Current standard coach seat widths range from 17 to 19 inches between the armrests, says Luedeke, and that little piece of real estate is known in the industry as "living space."

The term seems appropriate for some non-stop transoceanic flights that will have you inhabiting your "living space" for up to 18 hours.

I look at it like, I've leased this space for the next three hours.
Jeff Luedeke, TIMCO Aerosystems

"I look at it like, I've leased this space for the next three hours -- or however long the flight is," Luedeke says. At a recent industry convention in Hamburg, Germany, TIMCO asked volunteers to test seats. The testers didn't know it, but some seats had cushions and some did not. Many of the testers laughed when they found out later that their seats had no cushions. Even funnier: Some passengers said the seats without cushions were more comfortable.

"One of the most important things about a comfortable seat is the ability to move in it," Robinette says. "You have to be able to readjust your posture every so often for it to stay comfortable." Otherwise, she warns, passengers put themselves at risk of deep vein thrombosis, a serious health condition affecting people prone to blood clots. Sitting in place for long periods can lead to clotting in veins. Clots can break loose, travel through the bloodstream and lodge in the lungs, blocking blood flow.

Although America's butts are bulging, it doesn't appear that economy class seats are following suit.

"Our seating surfaces are contemporarily appropriate," says a spokesman for Southwest Airlines. The airline is in the process of reconfiguring seating on its entire fleet. But it's not changing the width.

Seat rows aboard Southwest Boeing 737-700s are moving closer together. In airline-seat speak the operative word is "pitch."

Pitch is defined as the distance between one point on a seat and the same point on the seat behind. A typical seat pitch in coach measures from 31 to 35 inches, Luedeke says.

Southwest's new pitch configuration moves its rows about an inch closer together, from 32 to 31 inches, according to the airline. In addition, economy seats will move only two inches during recline instead of three, the airline says. Amazingly, because of the new seat design, the airline says coach passengers will be blessed with an extra inch of legroom. Will fliers notice the difference? Let us know.

Bottom line: Southwest's new economy class seats will allow for six additional coach seats per plane. Bonus: The new seats weigh less, which will save about $10 million in yearly fuel costs. It's an "environmental win and a revenue positive move on the extra seats," says the airline.

In general, coach seats haven't narrowed over the years, Luedeke says. "I believe it's more of a perception caused by seat pitches getting tighter."

So now -- if rows are moving closer together -- we're playing footsie with legroom.

That's important. Thirty percent of Americans who answered arecent poll by TripAdvisor said comfortable seating is the biggest improvement airlines could make. And 41% said airlines adding more legroom would be the biggest improvement.

Over the past few years carriers have been moving toward a standard of charging more for seats with extra legroom.

These include seats in the forward coach cabins and emergency aisles that used to cost the same as other economy class seats. Also, some airlines have reconfigured seats to add a bit more legroom in certain aisles, for a price.

United Airlines started selling its "Economy Plus" extra-legroom seats for premium prices a few years ago, and now it's expanding the program. To make space for the extra 5 inches of legroom, United is removing three to six seats, depending on the aircraft. Legroom for United regular coach seats will remain the same, with a pitch of 31 inches.

The special seating lures "higher revenue and more frequent customers," says a United spokesman. Some customers want more space, he says, but "there are other customers who value getting the cheapest price, and for them ... the seating is not their highest priority."

Delta followed with a similar program last year, and American Airlines in March. American said it's in the process of removing at least four to nine coach seats per aircraft to create the extra legroom. Price: from $8 to $108 -- depending on the flight. They call it their Main Cabin Extra program.

Airline comfort poll

1. What's the biggest improvement airlines could make? 

--More legroom: 41% 

--More comfortable seating:30% 

--More bin space, free snacks, seat outlets, fewer delays, better entertainment: 29% 

2. On flights over 4 hours, would you pay $25 for more legroom? 

--Yes: 35% 

3. On domestic flights under 4 hours, would you pay for more legroom? 

--No: 71% 



Source: TripAdvisor poll of over 1,000 U.S. respondents 

In the TripAdvisor survey, 71% said they weren't willing to pay for extra legroom on domestic flights under four hours.

"Some view the ability to select a seat as an additional fee," says Bryan Saltzberg of SeatGuru.com. "Some view the ability to actually secure more legroom as actually a benefit -- and they're willing to pay for that benefit. It depends on who you're talking to and the carrier."

By the way, here are three magic words in the airline seat business: articulating seat pan.

The articulating seat pan is what allows airlines to move seat rows closer together without losing legroom.

In a traditional reclining airline seat, only the seat back moves. But with an articulating seat pan, as the back moves to the rear, the seat pan moves forward. "The back of the seat isn't moving as far as it traditionally did, but the feeling you get is that it moves further," Luedeke says. Because the seat doesn't need as much room to recline, it saves space for more seats. Also, the back of the seat is thinner, saving even more space.

It looks like coach seats won't be getting any bigger any time soon. That's largely because consumers don't demand bigger seats, Robinette says. Consumers demand low fares, so that's what airlines offer, she says. Consumers who demand better seats fly first class.

"The manufacturers are perfectly willing to make the wider seats," Robinette says. "They understand the issues. But their customers are the airlines. And they're giving the airlines what they ask for. The airlines are also giving their customers -- the passengers -- what they want. So the consumer needs to be smarter. The consumer is the one who needs to drive the width of the seats."

What do you think? It's a tricky balancing act between affordable fares and comfortable seating. Are airlines offering economy class passengers what they want? Let us know what you think in the comment area below.

In Vegas, Romney claims the nomination, but the focus is on Trump

By Holly Bailey | The Ticket

LAS VEGAS—Less than an hour after he officially clinched the 1,144 delegates needed to claim the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney celebrated his win by mingling with high-dollar GOP donors at a $2 million fundraiser here.

But it was hardly a victory lap for Romney. On a day that normally would have meant lots of free media for Romney's campaign, the Republican contender's message was instead overshadowed by one of the hosts of Tuesday's event, Donald Trump, whose renewed interest in casting doubt on President Obama's American birthright has dominated the news cycle in recent days.

Of course, you wouldn't have known that from Tuesday's fundraiser, where both men were careful to stay away from the birther controversy.

Introducing the Republican nominee, Trump avoided the hot button subject, instead talking up Romney's ability to rebuild the economy and strengthen the nation's standing around the world, especially on trade issues.

"He's going to turn this country around. He's going to create jobs like you haven't seen for many, many years," Trump declared. "We were a great country. Soon we won't be a great country at all... Mitt Romney will make us a great country again."

When Romney took the stage, he politely thanked his host—giving Trump props for "twisting the arms" necessary to make the financial event happen.

"I appreciate your help," Romney said.

But the Republican nominee quickly turned the focus to the path ahead, warning supporters that the path to November wouldn't be easy.

"I know the road to 1,144 was long and hard, but I also know that the road to 11/06, November 6, is also going to be long," Romney said. "It's going to be hard and it's going to be worth it because we're going to take back the White House and get America right again."

Among those in the crowd in Vegas: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who joined his former rival on the trail for the first time since dropping his own bid for the Republican nomination last month.

While Gingrich didn't speak at the fundraiser, he talked to reporters ahead of the event, defending Romney's muted reaction to Trump's birther conspiracies.

"Gov. Romney is not distracted, the Republican Party is not distracted. We believe this is an American-born, job-killing president," Gingrich told reporters, per the Los Angeles Times. "Other people may believe that he was born somewhere else and still kills jobs, but that's an argument over background. The key fact is for any American worried about the economy, Obama is a job-killing president."

Romney mathematically clinches GOP presidential nomination

By Holly Bailey | 

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Mitt Romney mathematically clinched the Republican nomination for president on Tuesday, accumulating enough delegates from his win in the Texas primary to pass the 1,144 needed to secure the nomination at his party's convention in August. The milestone for the former Massachusetts governor comes four years after he lost the nomination to Sen. John McCain and nearly two months after his closest challenger, Rick Santorum, suspended his campaign.

In his bid for the presidency, Romney has focused most of his talk on the economy, a theme he continued earlier today in Craig, Colo., where he insisted that President Barack Obama's policies "have made it harder for America to get back on its feet" and said the president's efforts to tout improvements in the economy are like finding "a twig to hang onto."

Speaking just miles from one of the nation's largest coal-powered energy plants, Romney accused Obama of over-regulating the energy industry and "making it harder for America to get back on its feet."

"I am not going to forget Craig, Colorado," Romney declared at a rally in a small city park. "I am not going to forget communities like this across the country that are hurting right now under this presidency."

But Romney's appearance in this tiny northwestern Colorado town also highlighted the difficulties the presumptive Republican nominee faces heading into November's election as economic measures like unemployment continue to show modest improvement under Obama's watch.

While unemployment in Moffat County—where Craig is located—was listed at 8.3 percent in April, Ryan Call, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party acknowledged that the city's economy was "stronger" than in other parts of the state. It was a reality that Romney seemed to address in his own remarks.

"I meet folks day to day who have jobs but wonder if they are going to be able to keep them," Romney said.

He argued that America faces a "crossroads" this November—casting the election as a choice between economic recovery or what he described as the Obama administration's unfriendly practices toward business.

"Government sees small business and big business as the enemy. We're not the enemy," Romney said. "Some of these liberals say they like a strong economy, but then they act like they don't like business."

Romney said that if elected, he would put into place "a government that sees its job as encouraging the good guys."

The decision to visit Craig appears to have been influenced in part by a video funded by a coalition of conservative groups that focused on how aggressive state regulation of coal was hurting the city's economy.

But a Romney aide insisted the video did not play a direct role in the selection of Craig as a campaign destination.

Still, nearly 200 coal workers were given the day off and bused to the event by Peabody Energy, owner of the coal-fired power plant near Craig. As Romney took the stage, they waved signs that read "Coal equals jobs!" and "No More Regulations!"

'Scandal' updates image of black women on network television

By Sarah Springer, CNN

(CNN) - Olivia Pope is smart, runs a successful business and is the center of attention when she enters a room.

She’s the kind of woman who magazines say every woman can be, and the type that others love to hate.

There’s just one thing: She is also black.

After a successful first season, viewers know that Pope, the lead character on ABC’s “Scandal,” is African-American.

But they might not realize the significance of her race.

Pope, played by Kerry Washington, is the first African-American female lead on a major network show in 38 years.

“Like any human being, [Pope] is someone who happened to be born female and black and those elements add to who she is as a human being,” Washington said. “So do I think that another person of another race could play her? Yes. Do I think it would change the story a little bit, do I think it would change the character a little bit? Yes.”

Portrayals of black women have come a long way from the blaxploitation-inspired characters like Teresa Graves, the last black actress to play a lead on network television, in “Get Christie Love!”

While blaxploitation was based on exaggeration, Olive Pope was based on Judy Smith, a real-life crisis management specialist for the George W. Bush administration.

“I hope that Olivia Pope being a lead of a television series and being smart and vulnerable and the most desirable woman in any room that she walks into changes something for someone in the way they perceive women of color,” said Shonda Rhimes, creator of "Scandal." “But I also hope that people watch it and find it to be good entertainment.”

An average of 7.3 million people watched the finale, according to Nielsen, and 1.8 million African-American viewers viewed the season finale that day. It was the No. 1 show among African-Americans for the week of May 14-May 20, 2012.

“Having the African-American lead really does make a difference,” said Rick Kissell, prime time ratings reporter for Variety magazine. “It is something that the networks can count on knowing that they have a built-in audience that maybe wouldn’t watch their other shows.”

Since the show has aired, Washington notes that viewers of all races have commented on how happy they are to see a smart and sophisticated woman portrayed on television.

“It’s the truth of her humanity that’s the hook,” Washington said. “The most important thing is that you believe her humanity and if you can do that, then lots of people can relate to her in lots of different ways.”

Pole dancing pushes bid as Olympic sport. Sorry ladies this is not a joke.

By

Stephen Smith

Argentina's Jessica Wajner competes for second place in the Miss Pole Dance Argentina 2011 and third place in the Miss Pole Dance South America 2011 competition in Buenos Aires on November 11, 2011 ahead the Pole Dance World Championship 2012 to be held in the U.S. 

(Credit: JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images)

The criteria for being considered a new Olympic sport is certainly evolving.

In 2009, the IOC deemed golf, rugby and women's boxing as worthy additions - but popular sports such as baseball, softball and karate were nixed.

Now another "sport" is staking its claim as Olympic caliber - pole dancing.

The campaign to get pole dancing into the Games has been in the works for a couple of years. But now, according to the Washington Post, the Pole Fitness Association and other like-minded groups are circulating petitions to get the dance form in the 2012 London Games.

Pole dancing may conjure up images of strip clubs but these days it's more about health clubs. The sensual dance is now commonly called "pole fitness" or "vertical dance" and according to the AFP, there are more than 500 pole dancing fitness studios across the U.S. Indeed, serious pole dancers arguably have athletic chops similar to some Olympic gymnasts.

"Nowadays there are very few who are training to perform in a strip club," Anjel Dust, an organizer at the California Pole Dance Championships, recently told LA Weekly. "It's all about fitness or competitions. There is no longer the stigma. I think pole dancing is being seen more as an art form."

That may well be true but how seriously will the IOC take someone named Anjel Dust? Pole dancing -- with its connotations of seedy night clubs and half-naked women - is still more Las Vegas than London. Other than a name change, pole fitness (or vertical dancing) may have to find another way to tone down its sexy past to make the Games.

While it's likely too late to get into the 2012 lineup, the pole fitness petition boasts over 6,000 signatures. It's worth noting that women's boxing got the IOC approval after petitioning the committee and that sport is not immune to sex-appeal controversy. Right now, organizers are deciding whether female boxers will make their Olympic debut in miniskirts.

Music is changing your brain

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

Bassist Victor Wooten says you don't need to start with the rules of music in order to play an instrument.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• When you can't get a song out of your head, it means neural circuits are stuck in a loop
• Music, like sex, drugs and food, release the brain chemical dopamine
• People tend to agree on the emotions they hear in music
• Victor Wooten, a famous bassist, approaches music as a language

(CNN) -- Michael Jackson was on to something when he sang that "A-B-C" is "simple as 'Do Re Mi.'" Music helps kids remember basic facts such as the order of letters in the alphabet, partly because songs tap into fundamental systems in our brains that are sensitive to melody and beat.

That's not all: when you play music, you are exercising your brain in a unique way.

"I think there's enough evidence to say that musical experience, musical exposure, musical training, all of those things change your brain," says Dr. Charles Limb, associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins University. "It allows you to think in a way that you used to not think, and it also trains a lot of other cognitive facilities that have nothing to do with music."

The connection between music and the brain is the subject of a symposium at the Association for Psychological Science conferencein Chicago this weekend, featuring prominent scientists and Grammy-winning bassist Victor Wooten. They will discuss the remarkable ways our brains enable us to appreciate, remember and play music, and how we can harness those abilities in new ways.

There are more facets to the mind-music connection than there are notes in a major scale, but it's fascinating to zoom in on a few to see the extraordinary affects music can have on your brain.

Making music sound 'better'

Ear worms

Whether it's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" or "Someone I Used to Know," or even "Bad Romance" or "Bohemian Rhapsody," it's easy to get part of a song stuck in your head, perhaps even a part that you don't particularly like. It plays over and over on repeat, as if the "loop" button got stuck on your music player.

Scientists think of these annoying sound segments as "ear worms." They don't yet know much about why they happen, but research is making headway on what's going on.

The songs that get stuck in people's heads tend to be melodically and rhythmically simple, says Daniel Levitin, a psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. It's usually just a segment of the song, not the entire thing from beginning to end. A common method of getting rid of an ear worm is to listen to a different song -- except, of course, that song might plant itself in your thoughts for awhile.

"What we think is going on is that the neural circuits get stuck in a repeating loop and they play this thing over and over again," Levitin said.

In rare cases, ear worms can actually be detrimental to people's everyday functioning, Levitin said. There are people who can't work, sleep or concentrate because of songs that won't leave their heads. They may even need to take the same anti-anxiety medications given to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, drugs that relax the neural circuits that are stuck in an infinite loop.

How we evolved to remember music

Given how easily song snippets get stuck in our heads, music must be linked to some sort of evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors.

Bone flutes have been dated to about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, so people were at least playing music. Experts assume that people were probably singing before they went to the trouble of fashioning this instrument, Levitin said. In Judaism, the Torah was set to music as a way to remember it before it was written down.

"The structures that respond to music in the brain evolved earlier than the structures that respond to language," Levitin said.

Levitin points out that many of our ancestors, before there was writing, used music to help them remember things, such as how to prepare foods or the way to get to a water source. These procedural tasks would have been easier to remember as songs. Today, we still use songs to teach children things in school, like the 50 states.

What about remembering how to play music?

When you sit down at the piano and learn how to play a song, your brain has to execute what's known as a "motor-action plan." It means that a sequence of events must unfold in a particular order, your fingers must hit a precise pattern of notes in order. And you rehearse those motor movements over and over, strengthening the neural circuits the more you practice.

But musicians who memorize how to play music often find they can't just begin a remembered piece at any point in the song. The brain has a certain number of entry nodes in the motor-action plan, so you can only access the information from particular points in the song.

"Even though it feels like it's in your fingers, it's not," Levitin said. "It's in the finger representation in your head."

Music and pleasure

Music is strongly associated with the brain's reward system. It's the part of the brain that tells us if things are valuable, or important or relevant to survival, said Robert Zatorre, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Montreal Neurological Institute.

One brain structure in particular, called the striatum, releases a chemical called dopamine in response to pleasure-related stimuli. Imaging of the brain can reveal this process is similar to what happens in your brain in response to food or sex.

But unlike those activities, music doesn't have a direct biological survival value. "It's not obvious that it should engage that same system," Zatorre said.

Musicians can't see inside their own brains, but they're aware of moments of tension and release in pieces, and that's what arrangers of music do.

Zatorre and colleagues did an experiment where they used whatever music participants said gave them pleasure to examine this dopamine release. They excluded music with words in order to focus on the music itself rather than lyrics -- the melodic structure, for example.

At the point in a piece of music when people experience peak pleasure, part of the brain called the ventral striatum releases dopamine. But here's something even more interesting: Dopamine is released from a different brain area (the dorsal striatum) about 10 to 15 seconds before the moment of peak pleasure.

Why would we have this reaction before the most pleasurable part of the piece of music? The brain likes to investigate its environment and figure out what's coming next, Zatorre explains.

"As you're anticipating a moment of pleasure, you're making predictions about what you're hearing and what you're about to hear," he said. "Part of the pleasure we derive from it is being able to make predictions."

So if you're getting such a strong dopamine rush from music -- it could even be comparable to methamphetamines, Zatorre said -- why not make drug addicts listen to music? It's not quite that simple.

Neuroscientists believe there's basically one pleasure mechanism, and music is one route into it. Drugs are another. But different stimuli have different properties. And it's no easier to tell someone to replace drugs with music than to suggest eating instead of having sex -- these are all pleasurable activities with important differences.

Rocking to the beat

Did you know that monkeys can't tap their feet to songs, or recognize beats?

It appears that humans are the only primates who move to the beat of music. Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, speculates that this is because our brains are organized in a different way than our close species relatives. Grooving to a beat may be related to the fact that no other primates can mimic complex sounds.

Snowball the cockatoo can dance to song beats, whereas monkeys cannot, says Aniruddh Patel.

Curiously, some birds can mimic what they hear and move to beats. Patel's research with a cockatoo suggests the beat responses may have originated as a byproduct of vocal mimicry, but also play a role in social bonding, Patel said. Armies train by marching to a beat, for instance. Group dancing is a social activity. There also are studies showing that when people move together to a beat, they're more likely to cooperate with each other in nonmusical tasks than if they're not in synch.

"Some people have theorized that that was the original function of this behavior in evolution: It was a way of bonding people emotionally together in groups, through shared movement and shared experience," Patel said.

Another exciting arena of research: Music with a beat seems to help people with motor disorders such as Parkinson's disease walk better than in the absence of music -- patients actually synchronize their movements to a beat, Patel said.

"That's a very powerful circuit in the brain," he said. "It can actually help people that have these serious neurological diseases."

There's also some evidence to suggest that music can help Alzheimer's patients remember things better, and that learning new skills such as musical instruments might even stave off dementia.

There still needs to be more research in these areas to confirm, but Limb is hopeful about the prospect of musical engagement as a way to prevent, or at least delay, dementia.

"That's a pretty amazing thing that, from sound, you can stimulate the entire brain," Limb said. "If you think about dementia as the opposite trend, of the brain atrophying, I think there's a lot of basis to it."

Music and emotions

You may associate particular songs with events in your life -- Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" might remind you of your graduation day, if you had a graduation in the 1990s or 2000s, for example.

Despite variation in any given person's life experience, studies have shown that music listeners largely agree with one another when it comes to the emotions presented in a song. This may be independent of lyrics; musical sounds themselves may carry emotional meaning, writes Cornell University psychologist Carol Krumhansl in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Educational shows such as "Sesame Street" have been tapping into the power of music to help youngsters remember things for decades. Even babies have been shown to be sensitive to beatsand can recognize a piece of music that they've already heard.

Advertisers exploit music in many commercials to make you excited about products. As a result, you may associate songs with particular cars, for instance.

Here's one way you might not already be using music: Making a deliberate effort to use music to alter mood. Listen to something that makes you energetic at the beginning of the day, and listen to a soothing song after an argument, Levitin says.

Music as a language

Victor Wooten of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones isn't a scientist, but he has thought a lot about the process of learning to play music. For him, introducing a child to music shouldn't be different from the way a child begins speaking.

"I just approach music as a language, because it is," Wooten said. "It serves the same purpose. It's a form of expression. A way for me to express myself, convey feelings, and sometimes it actually works better than a written or verbal language."

Traditionally, a child learns to play music by being taught how an instrument works, and learning to play easy pieces that they practice over and over. They might also play music with other beginners. All the rules come first -- notes, chords, notation -- before they play.

But with language, young children never know that they're beginners, Wooten said. No one makes them feel bad when they say a word incorrectly, and they're not told to practice that word dozens of times. Why should it be different with music?

"If you think about trying to teach a toddler how to read, and the alphabet, and all that stuff, before they can speak, we'd realize how silly that really is," Wooten said. "Kids most of the time quit, because they didn't come there to learn that. They came to learn to play."

He remembers learning to play music in an immersive way, rather than in a formulaic sequence of lessons. When he was born, his four older brothers were already playing music and knew they needed a bass player to complete the band. "My brothers never said, 'This is what you're going to do,'" he said.

Wooten took this philosophy and created summer camps to get kids excited about music in a more natural way.

"It's rare that I ever meet a musician who doesn't agree that music is a language. But it's very rare to meet a musician that really treats it like one."

There you have it: Music that gets stuck in your head can be annoying, but it also serves a multitude of other purposes that benefit you. If you treat it like a language, as Wooten suggests, you might learn new skills and reap some of the brain health benefits that neurologists are exploring.

It's more complicated than "A, B, C," but that's how amazing the mind can be.