The Brain on Music (The Mozart Effect)

Have you ever used music at work to jack up productivity or change your mood? Interestingly some rhythms. such as baroque, induce enzymes in the brain and add amazing well being and focus.  Other tunes leave you punchy … and unable to focus. Has it happened to you? 

Music holds an immensely powerful influence over the brain and yet few workplaces  benefit from addictive musical sounds. Listen to inspirational music and calm your thinking to see how it works. Or ratchet up brainpower with Makeba’s, Pata Pata. Then read on to discover what research could offer your day.

Across genres, you’ll find that music puts you in touch with your inner beliefs and desires and the cadence can create an amazing mental landscape for you to read, relax or reflect on your day.

Or it can make you moody, edgy and anxious. How so? Music shifts your brain waves that control how neurons talk to one another. Watch the visible shift happen for people in this video.

Start with your favorite tunes from Psychologist Don Campbell’s list here and tell us how music alters your mental states. In his book The Mozart Effect, Campbell shows the following results for listeners:

Gregorian chant creates quiet in our minds and can reduce stress.

Slower Baroque music, such as Bach, Handel, Vivaldi or Corelli, can create mentally stimulating environments for creativity and new innovations.

Classical music, such as Haydn and Mozart, often improves concentration and memory when played in the background.

Romantic music, such as Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky , Chopin and Liszt, enhances our senses and increases a sense of sympathy and love.

Impressionist music, such as Debussy, Faure and Ravel, can unlock dreamlike images that put us in touch with our unconscious thoughts and belief systems.

Jazz, blues, soul or calypso music can uplift and inspire us, releasing deep joy or even deep sadness, conveying wit and affirming our common humanity.

Salsa, rhumba, merengue and any form of South American music sets our hearts racing, gets us moving, both relaxing us and awakening us at the same time.

Big band, Top 40 and country music engage our emotions and comfort us.

Rock music, from Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones, stirs passion and activity, and so can release daily tensions. Rock can also mask pain and cover up unpleasant noises. It also has the power to create dissonance, stress or physical pain if we are not in the mood for energizing.

Ambient or New Age music such as Stephen Halpern and Brian Eno has no dominant rhythm, so it elongates the sense of space and time, inducing a state of relaxed alertness.

Heavy metal and hip-hop music excites our nervous system, and sometimes leads us into acting out dynamic behavior and self-expression.

Religious and sacred music such as hymns and gospel moves us to feel grounded in the moment, and leads to deep peace and spiritual awareness. Sacred music often helps us to transcend pain.

Consider what tomorrow could bring at work if you swing a bar or two of mental and musical acumen into a project today. It’s also fun to match the music with the moment and watch what you learn

Not surprisingly, research also suggests that music may recruit neural mechanisms similar to those previously associated with pleasant or unpleasant emotional states.

Link: http://www.brainleadersandlearners.com/multiple-intelligences/musical/the-brain-on-music/

Different Kinds of Music That Affect Your Memory While Studying

“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition,” said Albert Einstein, who did badly in school until his parents bought him a violin that he played to help him decipher various equations. Einstein believed that music was a key factor in helping him become a genius. Music can not only influence emotions and behavior, but it also can stimulate the memory. Researchers throughout the world have conducted various studies to prove that music can improve childhood development and stimulate memory while studying. An experiment in Los Angeles revealed that after schoolchildren received keyboard lessons their spatial-temporal reasoning test skills increased by as much as 34 percent.

1. Baroque Music

   • In experiments conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, Bulgarian psychologist Dr. George Lozanov found that incorporating classical music from the baroque period that uses a 60 beat per minute interval helped students learn new languages. His method helped students retain vocabulary information for half of a school year in just one day; students could learn foreign languages in less than a month at an 85 percent to 100 percent rate of efficiency. Students who took part in this study were able to recall information almost perfectly after four years without having to review what they had previously learned.
     

   The Mozart Effect

   • Named after a 1993 experiment by Professor Frances Rauscher and Dr. Gordon Shaw, the Mozart Effect said that listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can induce relaxation and increase the IQ, study retention and testing-taking ability of listeners. The Mozart Effect often proves to temporarily help increase memorization so that students can receive better results on certain types of tests. Researchers think this type of music releases chemicals in the brain called neurons that help the body relax so that students can study and retain information with greater efficiency. Listen to any of Mozart’s music, including Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, before studying or taking a test so that you can relax and increase your ability to retain process and recall information.
     

   Background Music

   • A test performed by researchers at the University of Texas in 1982 demonstrated how background music can help students memorize vocabulary words. The researchers separated students into three groups. The first group imagined the study words while listening to George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music.” The second group read the study words while listening to the same music as group 1, and the third group used no music at all. Students in groups 1 and 2 both received better scores than those in group 3.
     

Source: Different Kinds of Music That Affect Your Memory While Studying | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/list_5965674_different-music-affect-memory-studying.html#ixzz27n8MaEQy