In 2009, archaeologists excavating a cave in southern Germany discovered a flute carved from a vulture’s wing bone. The delicate artifact is the oldest known musical instrument on earth which indicates that people have been making music for over 40,000 years. Research proves making music is a universal human trait that dates back 35, 000 to 40,000 years.  Although we can’t be sure exactly when human beings began listening to music. Scientists have proved listening to music benefits all living beings – human, plants, birds, and animals.

Most people get tears, chills, tingles while hearing music. These are physiological responses which activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system occurs in quiet “rest and digest” conditions. Studies have shown that around 25% of the population experience this reaction to music.

Music activates many parts of our brain, including the so-called limbic system of the brain. It is the part of the brain involved in our behavioural and emotional responses to world around us. Limbic system is involved in motivation, passion, learning, and memory. In fact, music is known to stimulate almost every part of the brain. One of the most important functions of music is to create a feeling of organization or social connectedness.

Evolutionary scientists say human beings may have developed a dependence on music as a communication tool because our ancestors descended from the stone age. Music remains a powerful way of uniting people. Neanderthals (an extinct species of human who lived in ice-age) probably didn’t have the vocal cords or cognitive capacity for complex verbal communication. That’s something that developed with humans, and researchers think music is a direct product of this cognitive development. In fact, music is even seen as a form of language by many anthropologists.

Rhythmic entrainment: This refers to a process whereby an emotion is evoked by a piece of music because a powerful, external rhythm in the music influences some internal bodily rhythm of the listener e.g. heart rate. For example, the National Anthem connects us with our nationality, we love our country, therefore we feel proud that we are the people of this country. Our National Anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’ infuses pride and patriotism in us. The anthem highlights India’s national heritage and demonstrates patriotism and loyalty to one’s country.

Protest songs stir a sense of shared purpose during marches. Protest songs are often situational, having been associated with a social movement through context.  For example, in Dileep Kumar starrer movie Shaheed (1948) “Watan ki raah me, watan ke naujawan shaheed ho” song motivated the independence movement in hearts of thousands of youngsters.  

Hymns build group identity in houses and worship in social gatherings of worship. For example, ‘Bhaj Govindam’ which defines the composition and gives it its name invokes the almighty in the aspect of supreme god Shree Krishna; it is therefore very popular not only with Sri Adi Shankaracharya’s immediate followers but all Hindus.

Love songs help prospective partners bond during courtship. For example, ‘pal pal dil ke paas’ sung by Kishore Kumar from film Blackmail (1973) lifts the soul and many listeners get goosebumps while listening to the song.  The picturisation, the lyrics, the tune everything   is superb. Music has a powerful way of evoking emotions and connecting with our feelings. The theme of love, longing, and relationships are universal, and listeners find comfort or enjoyment in exploring these emotions through music, even if they are not currently experiencing them in their personal lives. Music allows you to connect with the universal human experience of love and emotions.

Lullabies enable parents and infants to develop secure attachments. Lullabies calm down babies and put them to sleep. It is a soothing song with the perfect balance of rocking music that lures the baby into sleep. Nursery rhymes have been a time-tested bedtime routine by parents over the years. Babies respond to lullabies; they calm down because they feel secured. “Surmai akhiyon me” from film Sadma (1983) is a beautiful lullaby sung by K.J.Yesudas is evergreen song today after 4 decades.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins suggest listening to music to stimulate our brain. Scientists know that listening to music engages our brain; they can see the active areas light up in MRI scans. Researchers have proved that listening to music can motivate people wanting to learn more. A 2019 study has proved that people were more motivated to learn when they were told that they would listen to a song as their reward. Music improves memory.  Music memory is one of the brain functions most resistant to dementia. That’s why some caregivers have had success using music to calm dementia patients and build trusting connections with them.

Conclusion

Music is universal.  It is considered the universal language. The reason is that it exists in every society, with and without words. 

During a trip to Africa, Carl Jung described a feeling of déjà vu when he viewed a slim, black man leaning on a spear looking down at his train as it made a turn around a steep cliff on the way to Nairobi. He writes, “I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world.” Although this world and this man were something alien to him, he saw the whole thing as perfectly natural. He called this recognition of what was “immemorially known.”

The famous Hindi Movie Madhumati of 1958 is a gripping story which revolves around Devendra (Dilip Kumar) and his memory from an earlier life, in which he is Anand, who falls in love with Madhumati (Vyjayantimala). They are separated, when Madhumati embraces death to escape a rape by Ugranarayan, played to perfection by Pran. Destiny brings Madhavi to rebirth of Madhumati and she helps Anand dig out a confession from Ugranarayan. In a chilling sequence, Anand discovers that it is the ghost of Madhumati, who returns to seek justice. Madhumati had all the elements of a typical Hindi Film Pot-boiler. The Haveli in which the hero experiences a sense of déja vu leading to his flashback, the naive and innocent village belle, the pardesi babu (city man) and the lecherous zamindar(land owner) lusting after the belle. Director Bimal Roy used these elements to utmost advantage.

What happens in déjà vu is that within split-second information is transferred from one side of the brain to the other. One side of the brain would then get the information twice – once directly, and once from the ‘in charge’ means the controlling side. So the person would sense that the event had happened before. This links back to the idea that déjà vu might have been caused by a strong feeling of familiarity. The familiarity is signalled by brain cells in the temporal lobe, but is noticed and ignored by another part of the brain that checks whether all the signals coming to it make sense.

After experiencing deja vu a person feels startled, perplexed feeling dazzled about his experience. It is a French word for ‘already seen’. Émile Boirac was the French philosopher, parapsychologist and a psychic who coined the word and since then a lot of discussion and research has taken place around has world.

Most of us have had the impression of re-visiting specific place, a specific incident in our dreams. There is apparent feeling of familiarity or a hazy memory of the dreamscape, a sort of dream déjà vu. An Experiment with Time is a book by the British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher J.W.Dunn (1875–1949) on the subjects of precognitive dreams and a theory of time. The book was published in March 1927, it was widely read and his ideas were explored by many other authors. Dunne has experienced many dreams and he wrote that such precognitive visions foresee future personal experiences by the dreamer.

The second half of the book explains that the moment of “now” is not described by science. Contemporary science described physical time as a fourth dimension and Dunne’s argument led to an endless sequence of higher scope of time to measure our passage through it.   According to Dunne, our wakeful attention prevents us from seeing beyond the present moment, whilst when dreaming that attention fades and we gain the ability to recall more of our timeline. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams, which are mixed in with fragments or memories of our past.

One important point to note is that spiritual people have recurrent experiences of déjà vu. Their Higher Self connects with them more easily and more often. Sometimes we feel for flash of seconds that we are with right people and everything is going good. This happens because our soul tries to tell us that we are with the right people and everything is great. It is very a subtle message which comes from our soul. Many people tend to brush it off as a chance. You may often feel that there’s something deeper going on that cannot be explained, that cannot be seen either, but it gives you the feeling something is going to happen……..this is because you are picking up on the motivations, intentions and feelings of either your own and sometimes others around you.

Deja Vu is experienced by most of the people, almost 90%, but most don’t pay attention and just brush it off. You cannot have everyone answer their experience of Deja Vu because a person should first point whether the brain is/was thinking it or the person has/had experienced something before or not. And, not being able to answer it, is failing of memory.

Have you experienced this – you are out for some work in market or are on a walk and suddenly you smelled something that affected your mood strongly? Well, I am not discussing allergies. I am discussing about aromas or smells here. They have a capacity to trigger some emotion in us, they can evoke a memory, elevate our mood or make us feel nostalgic. This sensation is also known as the “Proust Effect,” referring to the author Marcel Proust who wrote about memory recall as having a strong unconscious connection to certain smells. It seems an area in our brain which implicates emotion memory has immediacy to smells, more closely than any other senses.  Lot of research has gone into smells and odors which prove that they are particularly effective as reminders of past experience. They are stronger than other senses, such as sights or sounds.

Aromatherapy which is a form of alternative therapy uses the natural oils extracted from flowers, bark, stems, leaves, roots or other parts of a plant to enhance emotional and physical well-being. The inhaled aroma from these “essential” oils is widely believed to stimulate brain function. Essential oils can also be absorbed through the skin, where they travel through the bloodstream and can promote whole-body healing. This therapy is gaining momentum, it is used for a variety of applications, including pain relief, mood enhancement and increased cognitive function. There are a large number of essential oils available, each with its own healing properties.

Do certain smells and aromas Improve Learning Efficiency?

Yes it does. Boring subjects like History and Geography can be memorized with help of certain smells. It seems smells can be used to recall contexts, dates, time and places in particular, to enhance our memory recall. For example, if in a Baking class you were preparing a cake, perhaps after few years remembering the smell of an essence will enhance your memory of what the cake looked like. Perhaps when you once again will prepare the same cake, a particular smell of an essence could help you easily recall the process of cake making. It is said Rosemary essential oil helps in increasing learning efficiency.

Even music can bring forth memories of past experiences and bring a smile to our faces, so can the smell of a familiar meal cooking from the kitchen. A research has proved that the aromas of particular foods wafting through the house can make the senior citizen’s recall events from their past. Our sense of smell is thought to have the most profound link when it comes to unlocking our memories. Some aromas have the ability to pull our seniors as far back as their childhood.

Scent is the sense closest linked to memory. Studies have shown that people can remember a scent with 65% accuracy after 1 year while visual memory sinks to 50% after only a few months.  The smells we experience play a crucial role in how we associate with memories and places. Sometimes, a scent of something instantly takes you back to an old memory; it reminds you of your mother’s cooking or a childhood trip to the riverside, a distinctive scent sinks into your brain and stays there.

Smell has many connections in our life.

Smell can connect with emotions: You will be surprised to know that smell has a strong influence on the emotions we feel in our daily lives. The emotions we feel result the way we relate to places and brands. Visual Merchandising in retail industry covers all the necessity to capture the attention of the customers by all means from the facade of the store to the location of each product inside the store – may it be a department or specialty store, some consultants have expressed that stores are looking to make the shopping environment more welcoming by pumping in pleasurable aromas such as cedar, apple pie, vanilla, and green tea to help set the shopping mood. Customers get drawn to some scents which perks up their mood.

Smell connects with time: Smells can influence our perception of time. A whiff of coffee aroma or the tea aroma gives us the sense of time. Similarly the baby powder aroma might remind you of your own childhood or your children’s childhood. Likewise, pleasing fragrances have been shown to create “dwell-time” in stores, increasing the likelihood of customers making purchases. A sauce, a pickle, a jam or jelly can easily bond the customers with some of their memories.

Smell can comfort the health: In hotels, restaurants, spas and even in hospitals creating a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere for customers is a challenge. Many spas use jasmine or lavender fragrances to calm the customer’s mood. In book shops and music shops we get a typical musky paper fragrance.

Smell can increase productivity: Our senses of smell can even affect our productivity in organizations. Specific smells have been found to increase alertness which in turn results in higher productivity rates. One study found that when lemon oil was diffused throughout a Japanese office building, which helped increase productivity by 54% among data entry operators.  Scents can also be used to ward off mid-afternoon brain fog to revive our concentration levels.

The environment around us produces natural aromas. The environments can increase or decrease our stress levels. What you are smelling, seeing, hearing, experiencing at any moment is changes your mood. Nature heals us. Being in nature, or even viewing scenes of nature, reduces anger, fear, and stress and increases pleasant feelings. There is no substitute of aromas produced by trees, flowers, fruits and shrubs.

Sigmund Freud the father of psychology said that mind is landscaped. Like a landscape, mind has a structure and each structure has function of its own to play. In Freud’s model of mind the conscious mind (everything that we see and are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg of our unconscious mind. Our unconscious mind is like a storehouse of our primitive wishes, ideas, and impulse which are kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area. According to Freud the structure of the unconscious mind is like a large metal pot ‘cauldron’. So all that we desire but are scared to speak of and some events which have left lasting effect on us of which we are unable to speak because of fright are locked away in the unconscious mind. The ‘locking away’ process happens through suppression/repression. Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind; he stated that to a great extent it governs behavior of people. And, the objective of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious (aware).

In 1923, Freud developed a more structural model of the mind comprising of id, ego and superego. These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.

Freud said that the id expresses pleasures which comprises of two kinds of biological instincts or drives which Freud labeled as Eros and Thanatos. Eros helps the individual to survive; it expresses life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating and sex. The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido. In contrast, Thanatos is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings such as hostility, aggression and destruction. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.

The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego’s goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe manner which is socially accepted and does not harm others.  In contrast to the id the ego follows the reality principle as it operates from both the conscious and unconscious mind.

The superego develops during early childhood when the child identifies with the same sex parent and is responsible for setting moral standards to be followed. The superego operates on the ethics and morality principle and motivates us to behave socially in a responsible and acceptable manner. The superego makes us self-governed; we feel ashamed for cheating others or harming others and feel guilty if rules are not followed by us. When there is conflict between the objectives of the id and superego the ego acts as a referee and arbitrates the conflict. The ego can thus organize various defense mechanisms to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.

Freud has explained that our brain guards us from disturbing thoughts and memories by holding back them and he believed that we are almost entirely driven by unconscious sexual desire. So Freud used to say that our dreams are a secret outlet for these repressed desires. Sigmund Freud used dream analysis to interpret the fundamental language of dreams; it is very different from normal conscious thinking. Freud intelligently used id, ego and super-ego to support his research on dreams.

The study of dreaming is called Oneirology; its psychoanalysis runs through neuroscience, psychology, and literature. Do you know, till today the plain fact why we dream is still unexplained. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from coming up with some pretty fascinating premise; each study has come out with variety of reasoning.

Dreaming allows wish fulfillment: After examining and analyzing dreams of hundreds of his patients, Freud came up with a presumption that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Any dream, no matter how terrifying, can be looked at as a way of getting something that you want, either literally or symbolically. If you dream of falling from height, which is the most common dream, the dream suggests that you may have lost control over a particular situation in your life. The situation can possibly be linked to job, work, and school assignment, home or even in your relationship. Falling dreams are usually vivid ones that you can recall them quite easily and are able to remember most of the symbols.

Dreaming is storing an idea in memory: Famous psychiatrist Jie Zhang said that dreams are not just randomly-generated stories caused by neural impulses. Perhaps, there are also more reasons for dreaming them. He said that our brain is always storing memories regardless of whether we are awake or asleep. Dreams are a kind of “temporary storage” area of realization, a spot where we hold memories before we move them from short-term to long-term storage. A dream flashes through our mind before it is filed in our memory.

Dream often cleanses our mind: In our dreams we get rid of undesirable connections and associations that build up in our brains throughout the day. Basically, dreams are garbage collection mechanisms, clearing our minds of useless thoughts and making way for better ones. Essentially, we dream in order to forget the bad actions and deeds. Dreams help us get rid of the information overload of daily life and retain only the most important data. Yes, that’s the truth.

Strengthening what we learn: One theory suggests that we actually dream to remember rather than forget. It’s based on a number of studies that show people remember what they’ve learned better if they dream after learning it.  It supports Jie Zhang’s theory about long-term memory storage; our dreams help us retain what we’ve learned.

Psychiatrists suggest that we should keep people awake and talk to them for hours if they have experienced a trauma. The theory is reinforced by recent studies on trauma, which suggest that when people go to sleep right after a traumatic experience, they are more likely to remember and be haunted by the trauma.

Preparation for threats: Neuroscientist Antti Revonusuo of Finland suggested that dreams play a biological function often to replicate threatening events which prepare us to face it. People who have threatening kinds of dreams are better able to face threats in their waking hours, because they’ve already run through these in their dreams. Harvard medical researcher Deirdre Barrett suggests that dreams are a kind of theatre in which we are able to solve problems more effectively than when we are awake. This happens partly because the dreaming mind makes connections more quickly than the waking mind does. This idea is based in part on experiments she did where people were asked to solve problems while “sleeping on them.” The problem-solving outcomes were better for the candidates who dreamt.

Processing painful emotions with symbolic associations: solving problems in our sleep is itself a kind of Darwinian process. Basically, dreams are natural selection for ideas and this can broaden to the level of emotions, too. One group of researchers suggests that dreams are places where we run through situations and try to select the most useful emotional reactions to them. Psychologist Richart Coutts suggests that this is the best way to react to those situations emotionally. And, we often feel better about painful issues the next morning after a night of dreams. While a Darwinian model of dreaming suggests that we aggressively transform our ideas to weed out problematic and awkward emotions, a new model of dreaming suggests that the process is more like therapy. We don’t aggressively select for the most adaptive idea or emotion, we just run through those ideas and emotions and place them in a broader psychological context. Often, the brain does this by associating an emotion with a symbol.

So friends, dreams play an important role in our emotional, psychological and physical health. We have the romantic, terrifying, emotional, funny, awkward, loving, uniting, separating and weird dreams. What we may not realize is that these dreams are common across cultures and their seemingly wacky content is both important and meaningful. We spend an average of eight hours a night sleeping, which is basically a third of our life. About a quarter of our sleep is spent dreaming, which in an average lifetime represents about six full years of dreaming. Most of the researchers conclude that dreams play a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and to help us to find solutions to our problems.