What has been most exciting, today, is the discovery of effect of music on the brain. Music, researchers suggest, might derive more cognitive powers from its unique ability to access both the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Says Elizabeth Miles, a noted ethnomusicologist: “Maybe, be you think of yourself as left brain if you’re analytical or word-driven type or right-brain if you’re creative or visual. In general, the left brain handles symbolic activities, like language and logic, while the right brain is responsible for direct perception, including spatial tasks and abstract intuitive leaps.”
New studies have shown that listening to music increases the coherence between different areas of the brain. It is like using your computer RAM—to detect and predict patterns that activate many cognitive processes. As Noble laureate physicist Brain Josephson outlines: “Music is like atoms in terms of quantum theory.” He proposes parallels between DNA and music ideas, and also theories that music stimulates a primary level of consciousness. Not only that. Josephson likens balance-imbalance conditions in bio-systems to the tension and release patterns found in music and, suggest that music models the maintenance of balance for the human organism.
Appropriate music, especially classical, do not disturb us, in fact they can actually improve reading comprehension in children, and adults. Reason? Music plumbs our mental potential like no other. It can significantly raise spatial and temporal reasoning, vocabulary, facts, formulae skills, and concentration. The idea is self-explanatory. Music, played at the backdrop of your mind’s ear, especially when your child’s, efforts. It also has the ability to increase your physiological arousal, because the basis for utilizing music to fine-tune your brain is simple. As a matter of fact, the ear is the nervous system.
Hence, sound is our first source of information about the world. After we are born, the primary function of the auditory system is orientation and self-defense: one that is designed to detect, locate, and identify sound, and then integrate such signals into propulsive behavior for self-preservation.
The most ubiquitous use of music, however, is as a part of religious ritual. Some tribal societies use music to communicate with supernatural beings and its prominent use in modern Christian and Jewish services may be a remnant of just such an original purpose. Another, less obvious, function of music is social integration.
Music may serve as a symbol in other ways, as well. It can represent extra musical ideas or events (as in the symphonic poems of the German composer Richard Strauss), and it can underscore ideas that are verbally presented in operas (notably those of the German composer Richard Wagner), in film and television drama, and often in songs. There are other advantages too. Music is more powerful than herbs; it has a great healing properties. Music not only stimulates the emotional centre of our brains, but also our long-term memory. So, playing soft background music—or, what is called Focus Music—especially quiet classical melodies, at the work place, or, while studying—is a very effective strategy for many people.
