Can Music Improve Your Memory?
By: AnnaMarie Fernandes
My Opinion on the Subject
How?
Researchers found that listening to music synchronized to the human rhythm of your brains slow brain oscillations will enhance them. That increases memory and the quality of sleep you have.
Research
Dr. Born and his colleagues conducted the study by exposing 11 people to sound simulations. People who were exposed to stimulating sounds that were in sync with the brain’s slow oscillation rhythm, were able to remember word associations they’d learned the previous evening. Songs that was not in sync with the slow oscillation rhythm was not effective.
It Helps With Alzheimer Patients!
You Can Learn Languages!
A researcher found out that music can help learn notoriously hard languages like Hungarian, learned better if they sang the phrases. Melody may provide an extra cue, so it helps embed the memory.
It Can Help People With Brain Damages!
A recent study had people that had very bad TBI’s listened to number one songs in there life and it evoked their memories. Some of these injuries included car accidents or falling down from a great height. Most of these people suffer memory loss or amnesia. When they did the study then those people got their memory back faster than they would have had.
A Music Hallucination
A recent study from Frontiers in Neurology reported the case of a woman who, one night, suddenly began to hear music playing in her head, like a sort of internal, unstoppable jukebox . The problem continued for months.When she hummed the songs to her husband, he recognized some of them, but she herself didn’t know what they were or where they came from.It seemed the songs were so deeply rooted in her memory that she wasn’t consciously aware she knew them. They only came to the surface during these night-time hallucinations. She was treated with an anti-seizure medication and her symptoms improved a little.
This is the only known case of this kind of musical hallucination.
Take You Back In Time
Songs can easily take you back in your life. Most people have particularly strong memories of this time in their lives–psychologists have called it the ‘reminiscence bump’. But, perhaps surprisingly, one study has shown that people also have mini reminiscence bumps for the music their parents listened to, and even for their grandparents’ music.
The study’s lead author, Carol Lynne Krumhansl, explained:
“Music transmitted from generation to generation shapes autobiographical memories, preferences, and emotional responses, a phenomenon we call cascading ‘reminiscence bumps’.
“These new findings point to the impact of music in childhood and likely reflect the prevalence of music in the home environment.”
Another study has shown that we don;t need the tune just the words of a song. For a whole generation, the words “Ice, ice baby”, and for another generation “… you will remember me for centuries” are enough to take people back in time and remember memories.
Widespread Brain Activation
One of the reasons music may be so powerful is that it activates such large areas of the brain. A recent brain imaging study found that music activated the auditory, motor and limbic (emotional) regions. The study found that whether their participants were listening to the Maroon 5 or Mozart, the same areas of the brain were active. The motor areas process the rhythm, the auditory areas process the sound, while the limbic regions are associated with the emotions