The Amazing Power of Music
Your favorite tunes can affect you in more ways than you think
Whether you’re singing along Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi, or head-banging to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” in your Guitar Hero, you get a certain level of high – no matter how out of tune you may be.
Listen to a Tchaikovsky or a Rachmaninoff, or a Mendelssohn symphony and you will be moved to tears. Listen to Steppenwolf while cruising on a highway, and you’d feel like flooring your gas pedal. For most people, whether it is a melodious melancholic Alicia Keys or the gritty piercing riffs and brute force of a Rush, a Thundermug, or even a Judas Priest, music is an enjoyable form of entertainment.
And more.
Music de-stresses.
More health professionals now harness the power of music in hospitals to help patients improve their healing. Linda Fisher at Loyola University in Illinois, who is completing her coursework toward certification as a music-for-healing practitioner, says that music does not need to be something familiar. It is the type of music that puts patients “in a special place of peace” brought about by its rhythm, tonal qualities and melodies.
Studies conducted at Bryan Memorial Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska and St. Mary’s Hospital in Mequon, Wisconsin showed that music helps post-surgery patients by significantly lowering their heart rates, calming and regulating the blood pressures and respiration rates.
A study conducted on 236 pregnant women at the College of Nursing at Kaoshioung Medical University in Taiwan showed that music therapy reduces psychological stress. Lead researcher Chung-Hey Chen said that daily listening for 30 minutes of soothing music significantly reduced stress, anxiety and depression.
Music helps stroke patients
A study in Germany found that patients recovering from stroke benefit from music therapy by helping improve their motor skills. Other studies showed that music therapy helps boost immune system, improve mental focus, help control pain, and greatly reduce anxiety associated with pre-surgery stress.
In fact, if you’re headed for surgery, take your iPod. LiveScience reports that music during surgery reduces sedation needs. Such is the power of music that not only the patient under the knife benefits from it. Doctors also perform better while listening to music. This study was presented in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.
Music makes you “smarter”
Furthering the notion that music makes you smarter, Lutz Jancke of the Faculty of 1000 Medicine–the expert guide to the most important advances in medicine, is proposing to use music in neuropsychological therapy to improve language skills, memory, or mood. Musicians have been found to have structurally and functionally different brains compared to non-musicians. Jancke suggests that since music has such a strong influence on brain plasticity, it can then be used to enhance cognitive performance. This provides even greater validity and support of Volitions’ neuro technology.
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