What are the affects of music and what does it do to/for humans? How do the things that go into one’s ears affect his mind? Scientists have suggested that listening to classical music helps to “organize” the firing patterns of neurons in the cerebral cortex, especially strengthening creative right-brain processes associated with spatial temporal reasoning. Listening to music, these scientists concluded, acts as “an exercise” for facilitating symmetry operations associated with higher brain function. In plain English, it can improve a person’s concentration and enhance his ability to make intuitive leaps.
Music does many things for the human body including, making unpleasant sounds and feelings, slowing down and equalizing brain waves, affecting respiration, affecting the heart beat, pulse rate, and blood pressure, reducing muscle tension and improving body movement and coordination, affecting the body temperature, regulating stress-related hormones, boosting the immune function, changing one’s perception of space and time, strengthening one’s memory and learning, boosting productivity, enhancing romance and sexuality, stimulating digestion, fostering endurance, enhancing unconscious receptivity to symbolism, and generating a sense of safety and well-being.
Music also affects people’s moods. “Music soothes the savage beast” is a very true and popular statement. Music can calm and revitalize people in ways even a lengthy nap cannot. Music holds the power to elevate one’s moods above his worries and relieve debilitating depression. Music can also perk a person up if he uses it with exercise or dance. A person derives pleasure from music’s meaning, whether inherent in the sound or expressed through lyrics or the symbols of performance and participation. When speaking of the pleasure of music, what is actually being referred to is the sum total of all music’s pleasures and disappointments, a sort of average of the good and the bad. As music’s promises (anticipations) are fulfilled, one experiences pleasure; as they are betrayed, one feels anxiety or worse.
Every human being experiences joy, sadness, anger, and other such feelings. Many times outside events and people are what trigger one’s emotions. Music is one of these things. Music can help a person to be able to release his emotions. Bottling up one’s feelings can lead to an unhealthy emotional state. He needs to express his emotions, not repress them. Songs with violent lyrics increase aggression-related thought and emotions, and this effect is related directly to the violence in the lyrics, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Music affects a person’s actions as well. Some scientists believe that certain types of music can cause risky, deviant, or antisocial behavior. Other scientists believe that it’s not the music that is affecting how people act. They believe that people act the way they do because they were already prone to that behavior, and that is why they are attracted to that type of music.
Music can be used to help people in many ways, one of these ways being medically. Music and sound are beginning to play an active role in medicine as evidenced by studies in neurobiology and psychology. In this regard, music therapy is also making a contribution to the healing arts. Because pleasurable music increases the release of endorphins, the body’s natural morphine, it makes a person more tolerant of pain. Music can help one to consciously divert his attention from pain, as well as ease it.
Doctors in the coronary care unit of Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore report that a half an hour of listening to classical music produced the same effect as ten milligrams of Valium.
Whether music is affecting our mood, a system in our body, or the environment around us, it has been a big part in our society by all of its affects. There is no doubt about it. Music indeed affects humans and the way they live.
