Music and the Mind

When Albert Einstein was a young kid, his teachers believed that he was “too stupid to learn” They suggested to his mother that he just skip school and start manual labor early, because he was a hopeless case. But despite everything, his mother continued to make him go to school; in addition, she also bought him a violin.

Violin soon became one of his greatest passions, and he even stated himself, that playing the violin was what made him intelligent. His friend, G.J. Withrow had said, that whenever Einstein had trouble figuring out an equation he would go and improvise on the violin.

One reason that suggests this may have really helped him is that music has been proven to have short-term improvement on the performance of one’s “spatial temporal reasoning”. Spatial Temporal Reasoning is the ability to visualize spatial patterns or shapes and then mentally place them into particular sequences. A Person with good spatial reasoning is capable of mentally visualizing how a folded paper will turn out without having to use a physical model. This phenomenon has been given the name, the “Mozart Effect” because his compositions often have the strongest after effects of Spatial Reasoning.

It was said that Mozart’s music and a few pieces of baroque music, with a 60 beat per minute pattern, activated both the left and right parts of the brain. Because both sides were activated, one’s learning ability was greatly maximized and also their ability to take in information. Information being studied activated the left brain while the right brain was activated by the music. One of the key findings was that the Mozart Effect only improved certain parts of one’s spatial temporal reasoning, such as the task of mental visualization of a 3d object an...

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...for holding your long term memories. By listening to music they had previously heard or with a similar rhythm/tune could help them recover memories they had long since stored in the back of their brain. Even if the music does not retrieve a specific memory, it can bring back relevant emotions or feelings you felt when listening to the piece.

As if you haven’t heard enough already, the type of music we listen to has also been proven to change our perception of the world. Researcher Jacob Jolij and student Maaike Meurs of the Psychology Department of the University of Groningen experimented on a set of patients by giving them a task of determining whether smileys were happy or sad. It turns out that the melody heavily influenced their perception of how they saw the smiley and most of the patients identified with the smiley that fit best with the music.

Conclusion