✍︎ Hello! I hope everyone is well.. Today I wanted to talk about how important music is.
Music can be extraordinarily beneficial to numerous functions of life, and it aids in the development of different parts of the brain. Music helps improve memory, endurance, reduces stress, improves sleep, increases happiness, just to name a few. For me, music is a way to escape; if I feel distracted, energetic, bored, sad, angry — there is always a song or playlist that will let me get away. There are thousands of scientific studies about the long and short-term effects of listening to music. Here is one that talks about the different effects of various types of music on the brain: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5096663/
That article talks about two different kinds of music – artistic music and popular music. Here are functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans from the study
This shows that group B (Artistic Music) is more effective for stimulating the brain than group A (Popular Music). The article then goes on to talk about what parts of the brain are stimulated in each. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you check out the article; it’s pretty technical but isn’t too hard to understand.
So, if you’re interested in expanding your ability to memorize, improve your sleep, and let go of stresses – I highly suggest music as a way to relax. Preferably music without lyrics or light lyrics; music with lots of lyrics such as rap don’t help with focus. If you want to learn more about how music without lyrics helps focus, check out my friend Ben Pipher’s blog on that topic: Ben’s Blog
As a side note, Spotify, which is tremendously better than Apple Music, does something called Spotify Wrapped every year (If you have premium), which allows you to see statistics about your use of Spotify throughout the year. It also will show a personalized top 100 of songs from that year, along with Spotify’s (Machine Learning) prediction of what songs you will be listening to next year. The top 100 is nice too, since often I find myself finding songs that I used to listen to, so it is good to have a playlist of old favorites. I listen to an extreme amount of music, and I like to know all the stats about my listening, not for any particular reason, I just find statistics in general very interesting. For example, I listened to approximately 62,020 minutes of Spotify in 2018, which amounts of 11.8% of the year or 1,033 hours.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed. Be sure to check back next time!
⏦Graham
Graham's Inlab Experience 