MUSIC AND YOUR MIND!

                                                  File:Sound wave.jpgpicture by: Luis Lima89989

 

Have you ever felt a special connection to a certain song, or realized that a certain genre of music had an effect on your mood? Truth is most of us have, but do we do not really understand the complete affect that music has on our minds. The amazing thing is that music really does have a greater effect on us than giving us entertainment! Everyone perceives music a different way. Music can affect both memory and learning, and help in healing processes.

Music improves memory and learning in the human mind. Music has a drastic effect on learning potential. “According to The Center for New Discoveries in Learning, learning potential can be increased a minimum of five times by using this 60 beats per minute music” (O’Donnell). Imagine your current ability in your class rooms; now imagine your learning potential increasing by five times. The quality of your education would instantly be greatly increased. In addition, music can help increase your test scores. A study was conducted where one group of student listened to Mozart’s sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, one group listened to relaxation songs, and the last group did not listen to anything what so ever. They later took the Stanford-Beinet reasoning test, and the group that had listened to Mozart had improved test scores (How does music affect our body and brain?). Mozart’s musical pieces have 60 beats per minute, and so both pieces of data add up.

Music can also help humans with medical conditions. One example is elderly people who suffer from Alzheimer’s. Music helps people with Alzheimer’s connect with people, and be happy (Mucci).  Music can not only help elderly persons. When a harpist was introduced to a neonatal ward, the effects were apparent on the frantic babies. Practically all the infants breathed more easily; their heart rates steadied, and they rested. Many of them fell into deep sleep (Mucci). Not only can music affect Alzheimer’s, but I can also help with autism, Tourette’s, and Parkinson’s (How Does Music Affect Our Body and Brain?).  Although there is tons of evidence showing the positive effects of music, exactly why music has such an effect on people with such ailments is still uncertain (Klosowski). So it makes sense that scientists are continually researching how exactly music effects healing.

Music has amazing effects on humans. It can help your memory and learning improve, and it can also help people heal. Unfortunately many people don’t believe in the effects that music can have on the human body. They have probably experience many of the benefits that music provides, but just have not been able to recognize them. Next time you’re listening to your favorite album, or song, remember that not only are you being entertained but you’re also feeding your brain.

Why do you believe that music and the mind compliment each other so nicely?

Has music ever affected your mood?

Are there any other studies going on right now that would compliment this data?

 

23 thoughts on “MUSIC AND YOUR MIND!

  1. I didn’t realize music had such an effect on the human mind. Here’s what I’ve found out too: Today it is used in many hospitals to help patients relax and help relieve or ease pain. Music is also commonly used in counseling. Music therapy techniques may include guided listening or improvisational playing and are used within the context of many theories, and for many types of mental disorders, from depression to schizophrenia. Music is read differently in the brain than nonmusical tones and is connected to many different areas of the brain. Learning music
    relegates a larger part of the brain to recognizing and interpreting music.

    http://www.livestrong.com/article/166062-effects-of-music-on-the-human-brain/

  2. This is an amazing article! Music allows the right and left brain hemispheres to work in harmony rather than in conflict. The brain is the human body’s control center. The largest part of the brain is the cerebral cortex. Music has the potential to alter a person’s state of consciousness. A person can hear music even if its not playing, this is called Synesthesia. A person who experiences musical synesthesia may see a color, smell something, experience a taste, or feel a change in temperature due to the music they are listening to. According to research conducted by Oliver Sacks, humans keep time to music, involuntarily, even when not consciously paying attention to it. These are facts i never knew its was nice to learn about it.

    http://www.livestrong.com/article/157461-how-music-affects-the-human-brain/

  3. I always knew that classical music had a large effect on the way our brain works. When you mentioned the ‘Mozart Effect’, I did a little research. The website I found told me that not only can classical music effect our memories and such, but it also improves your IQ. It also brought up and interesting fact on how having children at young ages listen to classical music will enhance their creativity and learning abilities. Also, it was said that children with learning disabilities or social disabilities will have a boost in self-esteem if they listen to classical music and will be able to accomplish things a lot better than before. Hope it helps: http://5emusic.com/tag/mozart-effect

  4. An experiment that was published in 2001, explored the chills you get while listening to music. It was a deep emotional response to the music they played some of the music they played were Barber’s Adiago for strings, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. They did a follow-up in 2011 and they saw that a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure was released in the brain during peak emotional arousal. That is what they got from their experiments.

    I used http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=35682

  5. While reading the comments, jordandfall11 said something about synesthesia, a condition that causes a person to connect musical sounds with other senses like sight and touch. I myself, found this very interesting, so I checked out the link they had and realized that this topic has been explored by many scientists and synthesis’s alike throughout history. I thought that that was cool, but I decided it might be interesting to see if people with synesthesia connect colors and sensations to more than just musical attributes. What surprised me was that music is only one of the many genera’s of things that people suffering from synesthesia react to.

    What’s cool is that some people can actually identify colors that correspond strongly to different specific letters of the alphabet. In more complex ways, certain word/ letter combinations react with others to create entirely different colors than the ones originally assigned to the letters. Please check out this article; it’s very cool:

    http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/

    *you should also check out the program at the bottom of the web-page, being a creative person by nature, I found it inspiring in finding color schemes for different projects.*

  6. I found this blog to be very interesting to me. It’s all about music and the ways it can help all sorts of things. I fully believe that music helps people learn. For myself, music helps me concentrate, and it definitely affects mood. It can pump you up for a big game, or it can bring back memories and even make you sad. To expand on what you’ve already said about music helping improve your memory, here is a link. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Technology/story?id=116711&page=1
    Specifically, music helps improve your verbal memory. Studies show the more musical training you have, the better your verbal memory will be. The only downside is that when you stop your music training your improvement goes back down, as the studies have shown. Next, music not only improves learning, it specifically improves reading skills. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090316075843.htm
    Children in an environment of music have significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than the children not exposed to music. Authors say these are two important components of literacy. Overall, I would agree to say that music does tremendous things for people all around. I can honestly say I would be lost without music in my life.

  7. Music does not have all positive effects on the brain and the patients who listen to it. It also has several negative affects it can cause. Loud disruptive music can cause loss in its symmetry between its right and left halves. You can feel this happen when you are working hard on a task when loud or disruptive music is being played. The main genres that do this are hard rock rap, and hip-hop. This is because too much repetition can cause feelings of anger and hostility. To achieve positive effects of music on the brain, music must have certain attributes. It needs to be fairly complex to involve more of the brain in the activity and keep the person interested. New and different music is another factor that keeps the brain active and not bored. http://www.brainhealthandpuzzles.com/effects_music_brain.html

  8. I believe that music and your mind go great together because when you are having a bad day or something, you really understand the lyrics or what it is supposed to mean. But when you are happy and having a fabulous day, you don’t really care about the lyrics and your just listening to the music part of the song. Music has affected my mood before. It actually helps me a lot. When I take tests, I listen to certain kinds of music, when I go to bed, or when I just feel like it! Problems like excessive worry, anxiety, or depression create a ‘chaotic’ situation in the brain; hampers its working power, reasoning ability, and execution of conventional tasks becomes difficult. It happens because of reduced levels of serotonin. 50 million of the brain cells are affected by levels of serotonin. Music affects a steep rise in the levels of serotonin, which has positive influences on brain cells controlling mood. Thus, music is often used to treat anxiety disorders.
    Read more at Buzzle: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/how-does-music-affect-the-brain.html

  9. Music activates many different parts of your brain which means it can be used for therapy or for just getting you out of a bad mood. My mood personaly been affected by music many times generally it is the message in the song or just the rhythm even just the way the singer voice sounds (if there is a singer). There are many different variables in music like the pitch, rhythm, meter, and even timbre. These are processed in alot of different kind of parts in your brain to range of your prefrontal cortex to a part of your brain in the parietal lobe. The parts of music are split into rhythm and pitch to the left side of your brain and timbre and melody into the right side of your brain.

    http://www.omharmonics.com/blog/how-music-affects-the-brain/

  10. People say that music doesn’t help some people but I think it dues. I believe that we should have music on class room (vary softly in the back round), because it might help some students with their work or with their lessening. Some people ask why we do like music? We like music because it in our culture and it immerses us for hours each day. Everyone knows how it touches our emotions and our mind but a few people think of how music touches other kinds of thoughts. I think it touches other kids of thoughts because we either like the music or we don’t so it depends on if we like the music or if we don’t like the music. It is astonishing how little curiosity we have about so pervasive and “entertainment in or minds that influence us in our daily life. Some people say that people who study music will become a musician or conductors but some people don’t become musicians or conductors they just stop playing and don’t ever go back to it. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MusicMindMeaning.html

  11. Since music is something that we tend to grow up with I do believe that there is a strong correlation between it and the mind: from the lullaby we hear as infants to the classics we enjoy as adults, music is apart of our everyday lives. From the article I linked to, I learned that someone can even have “musical memories” which sounds completely beautiful. It is the minds way of looking back on some kind of memory associated with a particular song or composition and draws that memory back up, an astonishing mental feat.
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,46157,00.html

    Music has affected my mood before, and often times I play certain genres or artists knowing that I’ll feel a particular way after hearing it.

    http://www.nsi.edu/index.php?page=xii_music_and_language_perception
    This is a link to a site for the Neuroscience Institute which is researching the relationship between the brain and music

  12. I think that when someone is having a bad day, people tend to turn to music. It could either make you feel better and some people can relate to the lyrics. Also having music on in the backround can help some people focus more and help them study better. It is also proven that when working out, it gives you motivation and amps you up and listening to music before you play in a game can motivate you and i do agree about that. Some people also have a better chance of making what you’re studying into a song because it could help you rember way better and people memorize song lyrics way easier than just trying to learn the material.
    http://lifehacker.com/5865032/how-music-affects-the-brain-and-how-you-can-use-it-to-your-advantage

  13. I was really interested in other applications of music on people, so i did some more reaserch. I learned that music has a profound effect on infants. A study at McMaster University proved that when babies are exposed to music, they learn to point at out of reach objects and wave goodbye. The babies are also proven to be happier and able to handle change and challenges better than babies who are not exposed to music. I think that this information can be especially helpful to preschool teachers and parents watching children so that they can help the children gain an edge over other children, and offer them a chance to do better in school.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120509123653.htm

  14. Music doesn’t only help people with medical conditions. It also helps people who are learning a new language. By listening to music when learning a new language, you have 92% retention. The best type of music to listen to would be tempo. It helps you remember these things. Even though there are many positives on listening to music there are also negatives. Some types of music can cause the brain to lose symmetry between its left and right halves. As this happens it can indeed cause learning disabilities in children. The type of music that does this to children and adults would be heavy rock or rap. This type of music can cause anger in a person by the tone of the music. Also you have to keep your brain interested in the music and to do this you can change what you are listening to. You would have to listen to new and different types of music that you wouldn’t normally listen to.
    http://www.brainhealthandpuzzles.com/effects_music_brain.html

  15. This is a really amazing, powerful, video dealing with music and alzheimers-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw7Y78aqf_I

  16. Of late, music has emerged as a powerful tool for aiding in the treament of people affected by Alzheimers disease. This is a degenerative disease that deteriorates the brain, causing short term memory, memory loss, and dramatic changes in personality. Affected persons may not recognize their own children. However, Alzheimers patients seem to have a special response to music. It often stimulates patients memories, allowing them to recall things they never could without the presence of music.

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1126738,00.html

  17. I believe that for some people, not all, however, music can complement someone’s mind. That is to say, only some, not all, because I do not believe music has ever been a great help for me. Sure, music can affect minds but I believe it is more psychological than the actual music doing anything. We were raised to thinks certain ways about different tunes and so we only feel that way because we were taught that is how it is supposed to feel so that is how we should feel. Actually, there is something akin to this. There are now some music out there which have different frequencies, which is another factor on why music affects us so much, and can make your brain feel scattered, a music drug effect, if you will. Different frequencies and beats can affect our own brainwaves.

    http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/2008-08-07-digital-drugs_N.htm

  18. The stimulating effects that music has on the brain are absolutely fascinating. There have been many accounts of people having near-death experiences and developing a new fascination with music after the fact. One neurological condition called synesthesia has a lot to do with sound and music. A person with the condition hears music in different keys or played by different instruments and visualizes each key or instrument as a different color, sensation, or emotion. This condition is present in about 1 out of 4000 people and is more likely to occur in someone with perfect pitch. Having perfect pitch myself, I can attest that I experience a mild form of this condition with different keys; I associate some keys with different times of day. For example, I see the key of C as high noon, the key of E as the crack of dawn, the key of F sharp as twilight, the key of G as mid-morning, etc. Here is some more information on synesthesia:
    http://www.thereminvox.com/article/articleview/33/1/5/

  19. I think music can help your mood change a lot. I think if you are having a bad day a certain song can change that. When I take tests or doing homework I always listen to music to help me concentrate. Music can reduce stress it also can help you relax. If you listen to a song that has negative sayings it can make you feel worse. Music can alter your brain wave and even after you’re done listening to the song it still affects you. Music is a great motivator. Especially when you are feeling sad. This was a really good topic to talk about.
    http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/how-music-can-change-your-life/

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