Music has been used as a source of comfort for a long time. It has huge effects on humans psychologically and physiologically. It can even help ill people cope with their illness. This essay is about the power of music, how it effects humans, and some interesting subjects’ scientific explanations about music, which I suppose you are curious about.
Power of Music
Healing :
Music can provide a sense of connection, support, and understanding during difficult moments. The history of music in healthcare has shown that music can reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and even chronic physical pain. Back then, people used only music for psychological illnesses. Listening to calming music can help people relax and focus on the present moment.
Studies have also found that listening to music helps release endorphins, hormones associated with pleasure, which further reduce stress levels and may even contribute to the healing process.
Music is often used in therapy sessions for this reason; it helps create an atmosphere to provide stress relief and heal emotional wounds. In addition to reducing stress levels, music can also be used as a form of self-expression or communication when even words fail us.
Listening to uplifting songs or singing along with them can help boost our moods by increasing serotonin levels in the brain, the neurotransmitter responsible for regulating our emotions and feelings of happiness or sadness.
Concentration and Focus:
The rhythm and melody of certain pieces of music can help focus attention on tasks that require concentration, such as reading or writing an essay. Instrumental tracks without lyrics are often best for this purpose since they won’t distract you with words or singing voices like vocal-based songs might. Classical works by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach are particularly effective when it comes to aiding concentration due to their structured patterns and melodic progressions, which encourage mental clarity and focus on the task at hand rather than allowing your mind to wander off into daydreaming mode.
Stress Reduction:
Music has long been known for its calming effects on both body and mind, making it an ideal choice when trying to reduce stress levels in high-pressure situations such as exams or job interviews where nerves could get the better of you. Listening to soothing sounds before taking part in these activities will not only relax your muscles but also clear away distracting thoughts so that you can stay focused on achieving success in whatever challenge lies ahead.
Memory Improvement:
Listening to music can help stimulate the brain and improve memory recall. Adults are always telling students not to listen to music while studying. They think it is not possible to concentrate and get the information into permanent memory by multi-tasking. However, studies have shown that people who listen to classical music while studying are more likely to remember what they learned than those who don’t listen to any music at all. This is because listening to certain types of music helps activate parts of the brain associated with learning and memorization. Listening to familiar songs can also trigger memories from past experiences, which may be beneficial for those suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
How does music evoke memories?
The relationship between music and memory is powerful. Music evokes powerful emotions that then bring back memories. When we listen to a piece of music from years ago, we seem to travel back to that moment. We can feel everything as if we were there.
Our long-term memory can be divided into two distinct types: implicit memory and explicit memory. Explicit memory is a deliberate, conscious remembering of the past. Explicit memory involves things like textbook learning or experiential memories, things that must be consciously brought into awareness.
Implicit memories are our unconscious and automatic memories. For example, playing a musical instrument or recalling the words to a song when someone sings the first few words. A large part of memory takes place in the unconscious mind.
Explicit memory fades in the absence of recall, while implicit memory is more enduring and may last a lifetime even in the absence of further practice. The explicit memory systems are damaged by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Implicit memory can be formed by passively listening to background music. We may even develop a preference for certain music pieces simply because they have been repeatedly played in the background. This psychological phenomenon is known as the “mere exposure effect.”. People tend to like what is most familiar. Major labels know that frequent airplay is the key to successful record sales.
Implicit memory is a form of classical conditioning. An event, an emotion, and a song get connected through implicit memory. When a piece of music is paired with a very emotional event, it can be an effective cue to bring back the strong emotion that was felt at that moment.
Music helps to recall all the memories that you’ve connected with a song. Listening to a piece of music that was played a lot during a significant life event, such as a wedding or funeral, can trigger a deeply nostalgic emotional experience.
Why do earworms happen?
Some surveys have found that 90 percent of people experience this phenomenon, and for about a third of them, it’s annoying. It’s known as an earworm, and it comes from the German word ohrwurm, meaning a musical itch. It was coined in 1979 by the psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert, and basically, it’s a looped segment of music that’s usually about 20 seconds long and automatically comes into your awareness and keeps playing on repeat. There are certain musical characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms, such as if the piece is repetitive, if there is a longer duration of certain notes, or if the intervals between the notes are smaller. Also, songs that trigger some kind of emotional charge, either consciously or not, or songs associated with a particular memory, can often be the ones that get stuck in your head.
Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have looked at the structure of the brain, and the results make sense in terms of the processes described above. There’s involvement of the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain that supports musical perception, and connections between that cortex and deep temporal-lobe areas, like the hippocampus or parahippocampal gyrus, that are important in memory encoding and retrieval. The phonological loop has been implicated—the process of holding something in your mind, like a mental scratchpad, for a certain number of seconds. So there are networks in the brain that support these functions of music, memory, attention, keeping something in your head, and working memory. And then there’s the connection to the emotional regions of the brain, like the amygdala, which is involved in salience and negative emotion, and the ventral striatum, or nucleus accumbens, which is involved with positive emotion and reward. These are all elements that are thought to be involved in earworms.
What happens is that connections in our brains involving these regions get “stuck,” resulting in an automatic playing out of musical memories. Some research suggests that people who have difficulty with working memory, like those suffering from attention-deficit disorder, may experience earworms less, while people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, where there are these loops that play over involuntarily in their heads, may be more prone to earworms.
It’s also important to remember that music is universal across all cultures. Music, including some pre-verbal or simple aspects of it, is involved in our prehistory and our evolution in terms of things like changes of pitch that are necessary for communicating emotion or just communicating in general. And music was used together with rhyming before the written word in many cultures to help people remember oral histories. Our brains evolved to remember these associations and these snippets.
To get rid of an earworm, you can try distraction, engaging in another thing that will require the use of some of these brain regions, circuits, and functions so that you’re taking them literally in another direction. Others advocate more of a mindfulness approach—just let it play out and try not to focus on it too much. And then some suggest playing actual music, because you can replace what has been stuck in your head with something else.
Interesting Fact
Music affects heart rate, pulse, and blood pressure. The human heart is adjusted according to sound and music. In my opinion, this is the most interesting fact about music that proves how powerful it actually is. The pulse corresponds to qualities related to music, such as frequency, tempo, and pitch, and it speeds up or slows down to synchronize with the rhythm of the sound. Similar to the rate of breathing, a lower heart rate creates less physical tension and stress, aiding the body in self-healing. Music is a natural pacemaker for the heart. Like all living things, music also has a pulse. The pulse of music determines the listener’s pulse. Besides all the other strong effects that music has, changing the heartbeat is something different and really impressive!
Some Quotes
“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
Oliver Sacks, best-selling author and professor of neurology at NYU School Of Medicine
“Music is life itself.”
Louis Armstrong, jazz trumpeter (1901-1971)
“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Bob Marley (1945-1981)
