Listening to old musicOne of the best ways to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process is listening to music which is a great tonic for mind. It provides a total brain workout. Research has proved that listening to music reduces anxiety, blood pressure, and pain. Music improves sleep quality and improves memory.
Music helps to keep the brain toned like how the gym helps us to keep the body firm. It is the exercise of the brain. “There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does,” says one Johns Hopkins ENT specialist“. He says that if you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.
What is the brain-music connection?
Scientists are trying to understand how our brains can hear and play music. A stereo system puts out vibrations that travel through the air and someway get inside the ear canal. These vibrations tickle the eardrum and are transmitted into an electrical signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where it is reassembled into something we perceive as music. It is an amazing fact that music is structural, mathematical, and architectural. It is created on relationships between one note and the text. We are hardly aware of it, but our brain does a lot of calculations to make sense of it says an ENT surgeon.
Johns Hopkins research center has conducted dozens of jazz performers and rappers improvise music while lying down inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine to watch and see which areas of their brains light up.
Music helps to recall lost memories
Reach for familiar music, especially if it stems from the same time period that you are trying to recall. While listening to an old favorite song it takes you back a number of years and to the moment that you first heard it. The biggest fact is it connects you with all those memories of activities which took place when you heard it. This music-tracking activity becomes even stronger when you want to recall something strongly. For example, there are number of Hindi movies songs that connect me with my school days to the extent of remembering particular standards (grades) and the school activities in those years; such as sports and cultural competitions, exams, maths and language teachers, pedagogies adopted by teachers, examples given by them, stories told by my drawing teacher…..and I get so nostalgic while listening to those songs. The only point is then I did not understand the real meaning of those songs which I do now.
Listening to the Beatles, Boney M and ABBA I go the year for the first time we had a tape recorder in our house; because my sisters enjoyed English numbers even I started enjoying it with them.
Our body reacts to music in different ways
If you pay attention, our body reacts differently to a different genre of music. We must pick the ones which work for us. It certainly helps a lot to unwind. In anxiety disorder with lifetime occurrence which is characterized by symptoms that develop following exposure to traumatic life events and that cause an immediate experience of intense fear, helplessness, or horror, music helps in releasing the anxiety symptoms to a great extent.
Older numbers are fresher
I think older music helps us more. When listening to older songs, the beat, voice, and the entire song, in general, is less edited and as a result, produces better music than the majority of the modernized genres of today. Also, the lyrics and the tunes are catchier. It’s almost impossible to not sing along with them. Singing along those catchy numbers is so relaxing.
We all tend to love music which our parents loved
We actually do love what our parents listen to, the songs they loved, maybe because they were the first influencers in our lives. Listening to old music plays a powerful role in our lives in shaping our personalities, our belief system, our likes, and dislikes, etc.
I conclude that music is truly medicine to our mind and body.
