Positive Effects Of Listening To Music

Musical is art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony. Some of these questions have remained unanswered and might stay that way for a while. One thing, however, is for certain: music does affect our daily lives. This essay will discuss the positive effects of listening to music.

Music affects our emotions. When we listen to sad songs, we tend to feel a decline in mood. When we listen to happy songs, we feel happier. Upbeat songs with energetic riffs and fast-paced rhythms (such as those we hear at sporting events) tend to make us excited and pumped up. With all this in mind, I sent out a survey to the students of Basehor-Linwood High School, asking some simple questions about their music taste and how music makes them feel. Studying these results shows some interesting facts. When asked about their listening habits, mixed results were found in accordance with the amount of time spent listening to music daily. About 22.2 percent of people said that they listen to music between one to two hours every day, while another 22.2 percent said they listen at least five hours a day. The category of two to three hours a day sees about 18.4 percent of people in the school, and three to four hours meets a close second to that, at 16.5 percent. Only 11 percent of people listen to less than an hour’s worth of music every day, and even less listen to four to five hours a day; about 9.5 percent It seems that there isn’t really a happy medium. Either people listen to music a little, or they listen to music all the time. Music takes different standpoints in different people’s lives, and it matters more or less to one person than it does to another.

Music is a crucial element of everyday life. People spend hours listening to it and billions of dollars buying it. Yet despite the pervasiveness of music, mainstream social‐personality psychology has hardly given any attention to this universal social phenomenon. Why is music important to people? What role does music play in everyday life? This article reviews research in fields outside mainstream psychology concerned with the social and psychological factors that influence how people experience and use music in their daily lives. The research in this area shows that music can have considerable effects on cognition, emotion, and behavior. It also indicates that people use music to serve various functions, from emotion regulation to self‐expression to social bonding. Research in this emerging field reveals how social‐personality psychology can inform our understanding of music, and in doing so it highlights the real‐world relevance of mainstream theory and research.

Music is not only able to affect your mood -- listening to particularly happy or sad music can even change the way we perceive the world, according to researchers from the University of Groningen. Music and mood are closely interrelated -- listening to a sad or happy song on the radio can make you feel more sad or happy. However, such mood changes not only affect how you feel, but byalso change your perception. For example, people will recognize happy faces if they are feeling happy themselves. A new study by researcher Jacob Jolij and student Maaike Meurs of the Psychology Department of the University of Groningen shows that music has an even more dramatic effect on perception: even if there is nothing to see, people sometimes still see happy faces when they are listening to happy music and sad faces when they are listening to sad music.

Falling is a serious medical problem, particularly for people over 65; in fact, one of every three senior citizens suffers at least one fall during the course of a year. Can music help? A 2011 study says it can. The subjects were 134 men and women 65 and older who were at risk of falling but who were free of major neurologic and orthopedic problems that would limit walking. Half the volunteers were randomly assigned to a program that trained them to walk and perform various movements in time to music, while the other people continued their usual activities. At the end of six months, the 'dancers' exhibited better gait and balance than their peers — and they also experienced 54% fewer falls. Similar programs of movement to music appear to improve the mobility of patients with Parkinson's disease.

To sum it all up we learned that music does affect your daily basis in life. It can affect your mood in every situation and it can also help you with your problems. If you’re happy you listen to happy music, if you’re sad you listen to sad ones… etc. In life music has a huge part in making it alright and it’s also a way to express yourself.

Musicians get mad skills at interlinked tasks like planning, strategizing, and paying attention to detail because they benefit from learning to quickly handle both cognitive and emotional elements at the same time. When musicians process memories, they tend to use an unusual tagging system that lets them file memories in multiple categories.

Anyone who spent hours of their young life practicing fingerings and drilling scales understands that the tedium is real. Thankfully though, new scientific research has concluded without a shadow of a doubt that all that time and energy was not wasted: Learning to play an instrument is one of the most effective ways to improve the cognitive powers of the mind. You and everyone else who learned to play an instrument as a child are smarter now because of it. Children with one to five years of musical training were able to remember 20% more vocabulary words read to them off a list than children without such training. That's especially compelling because highly developed verbal memory skills have numerous applications in non-musical contexts, such as helping students learn and remember more content from speeches and lectures. Musicians who began their training as children have also been shown to learn new languages more quickly. Music-making engages both halves of the brain equally. By stimulating the left brain, which is the more mathematical, calculating, and syntactic hemisphere, and the right, which is the more creative, musicians build a strong corpus callosum, which acts as a neural bridge between the two hemispheres. Musicians who begin their training around 7 years old have a significantly larger corpus callosum than others without the same training. That means that the two halves of musicians' brains can communicate with one another more quickly and along more diverse routes across their expanded corpus callosum. As a result, musicians are more likely to be inventive problem-solvers. All that plays into the strengthening of the brain's executive functions, including the ability to strategize, retain information, regulate behavior, solve problems, and adjust plans to changing mental demands. The results of one such study on the connections between music training and executive function found increased activity in the supplementary motor area and prefrontal cortex of musicians’ brains, two areas that are often seriously deficient in people suffering from executive function disorders, such as ADHD. Musical training can therefore be a huge therapeutic tool for helping adults and children manage and overcome their symptoms. It's all remarkable, but the most incredible aspect of all of these studies is the exclusivity of these cognitive benefits to music. No other art form, hobby, or activity can produce the same level of lasting neurological benefits as music. And these benefits are never out of reach. Sustaining musical activity into adulthood, or picking up an instrument for the first time, can do wonders to stave off the effects of aging by slowing cognitive decline, decreasing the risk of dementia, and improving working memory and motor control. Think about all that when you're burrowing into the couch to binge-watch Netflix and instead go dig that keyboard out from your closet. Your brain will return the favor somewhere down the line.

New research shows that musicians' brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation. The new study was conducted by Fred Travis, Maharishi University of Management in the US, Harald Harung, Oslo University College in Norway, and Yvonne Lagrosen, University West in Sweden. They relate to high mind brain development, and it appears that this represents a basic potential to become good at something. The researchers measure mind-brain development in several ways. EEGs reveal special patterns in the electrical activity of the brain in people with high mind brain development. They have well-coordinated frontal lobes. Our frontal lobes are what we use for higher brain functions, such as planning and logical thinking. Another characteristic is that activity at a certain frequency, so-called alpha waves, dominates. Alpha waves occur when the brain puts together details into wholes. Yet another EEG measure shows that individuals with high mind brain development use their brain resources economically. They are alert and ready for action when it is functional to be so, but they are relaxed and adopt a wait-and-see attitude when that is functional. Two questionnaires are also used to measure mind-brain development. One has to do with moral reasoning. Those with high mind brain development score higher here. The other questionnaire targets what are called peak experiences. These are described as a higher level of consciousness. You have an intense feeling of happiness and harmony and of transcending limitations. Individuals with high mind brain development have many peak experiences. Fred Travis emphasizes that everything we do changes our brains. Transcendental meditation and making music are activities people should devote themselves to if they wish to change their minds in the right direction. But you can make good progress by following common health recommendations: get enough sleep, work out physically, eat healthily, and don't do drugs. How you think also plays a role. 'If you are a very envious, angry, mean person and that's the way you think about people that's what's going to be strengthened in your brain. But if you are very expanded and open and supportive of others, there will be different connections,' says Fred Travis.

Many of us may have an ear for music, but what about our brains? Is there such a thing as the brain for music? There seems to be. Several scientific studies lead us to believe that the brains of musicians are different from the brains of those who are not musically inclined. The preponderance of evidence suggests that there is a correlation between musical training and the way our brain functions. Most specifically, the studies show that, unlike artists or other creative individuals, musicians have distinctly recognizable brains, enlarged and asymmetric in the auditory cortex, the region of the brain that is responsible for hearing. More recent studies also reiterate the finding that musicians' brains are, indeed, different. A joint project by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Music Research Institute, presented at the 2007 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego shed some interesting light on this phenomenon. A neurological comparison of 20 music conductors and 20 non-musicians showed that both groups tended to tune out their visual sense while performing a difficult hearing task. But as the task became more complex, only the non-musicians tuned out their visual sense, while the conductors, who are used to differentiating very subtle differences in sounds, were able to focus on a difficult auditory task. This finding led the researchers to conclude that the conductor's musical training and experience had an impact on how their brains work.

In our learning musicians have healthier minds since they developed in advance. Not just in memory but also in mental exercises. They nurture their minds in the field of music and it developed them with high memory and it makes them smarter since they are always thinking like thinking about the lyrics, the tune, the melody…etc that’s why they have a much healthier mind.

Music has a special power to move us and stir our emotions. Anyone who has ever wiped tears away from their eyes listening to their favorite sad song will know how powerful simple notes and chords can be. Listening to a song can have a real effect on various parts of the brain, with studies showing that areas responsible for aspects, such as memory and vision, can 'light up' in response to music.

Music can be an effective and positive treatment for people dealing with mental health conditions. 'There are two distinct ways music therapy is used: either as a means of communication and self-expression or for its inherent restorative or healing qualities,' says Bridget O'Connell. 'Someone who is very withdrawn may find that music can act as an outlet for expressing things that they're unable to put into words. It can also act as a stimulus to awaken buried memories or evoke emotional responses that may take weeks to achieve with talking therapies.

Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels—all biological markers of stress. In one study, researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain. In another study involving surgery patients, the stress-reducing effects of listening to music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug. Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect.  In a recent study, 272 premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music—either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist—three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU. Though all the musical forms improved the babies’ functioning, parental singing had the greatest impact and also reduced the stress of the parents who sang. Though it’s sometimes hard in studies like this to separate the effects of listening to music versus other factors, like the positive impacts of simple social contact, at least one recent study found that music had a unique contribution to make in reducing anxiety and stress in a children’s hospital, above and beyond social contributions.

Music can ease the pain. Music can meaningfully reduce the perceived intensity of pain, especially in geriatric care, intensive care, or palliative medicine (an area of healthcare that focuses on preventing and relieving the suffering of patients). Improve sleep quality. Listening to classical music has been shown to effectively treat insomnia in college students, making it a safe, cheap alternative to sleep-inducing meds. Enhance blood vessel function. Scientists have found that the emotions patients experience while listening to music have a healthy effect on blood vessel function. Music both made study participants feel happier and resulted in increased blood flow in their blood vessels. Reduce stress. Research has found that listening to music can relieve stress by triggering biochemical stress reducers (think of these physiological processes as anti-stress ninjas).

In our thoughts, music is not only an ordinary kind of leisure, Music affects us in many different ways, and provides us with many benefits. The brain can even be improved by listening to music, and so can our mental and physical health. Music can even be used to boost our mood. However, we have to know which type of music is most beneficial for us, as it is normally based on personal preference, even though classical music is usually the most rewarding. This ancient art is also one of the most powerful forms of healing for many different sicknesses. Music is truly amazing!

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