Mindful Music
Have you ever wondered why memorization of information is so much easier when it’s put to music? For most of us, the words and melodies to at least one or two songs can float to the surface even if we learned them as far back as preschool and haven’t sung them since, thus proving that music is a powerful instrument (pun intended) that increases memory.
With trillions of connecting and combining neurons, the human mind is capable of holding a mind-blowing (again, pun intended) amount of memories. Our brains could be considered the largest storage units on earth.
Debates of how the brain functions as it relates to memory continue among neuroscientists, but they all agree that information set to music is the easiest to remember.
According to expert Henry L Roediger, professor of psychology at the Memory Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, getting information into the brain’s memory processing areas, (the hippocampus and the frontal cortex) is relatively easy, it’s retrieving the data that’s difficult.
This begs the question, why is retrieval easier when we have learned something set to music?
The answer is structure.
If someone asked you to share the words to a particular song, you would probably have to start singing the song to retrieve them. The song’s structure is what allows you to recall those words.
The structure of music acts as a trigger to unlocking information stored in the brain.
In our next letter we’ll be examining the structure of song and it’s keys (last pun, I promise!) to unlocking data. We’ll also reveal the secret of the other three R’s!
In the meantime, it’s important to understand what a powerful device music is and how impactful it can be for planting positive messages in your child’s heart and mind that will stay with them into adulthood. It’s equally important that we guard our children against the opposite messages that will rob them of joy and destroy their self-image.
Many of us are careful about the visual content our kids are watching, but tend to be far less thoughtful about the aural content they are exposed to.
The responsibility is ours as long as we are the choice-makers in our children’s lives. But know this; the window of time is shorter than you expect. Take the time and energy now to guide your kids when it comes to what they’re listening to. It will bless them today, and serve them for a lifetime.
Are you mindful as to what your children are listening to?