Music is much more than just a pleasant pastime. Music can be a balm for the soul and contribute to the intellectual and social development of children. For adults on the EKmixmaster, music mobilizes the brain and releases happy hormones. And this affects the hormonal background. Sounds act primarily on the adrenal and pituitary glands. Depending on the type of music, different hormones are released – adrenaline with fast and aggressive music, norepinephrine with soft and calm sounds. The latter can, for example, reduce the release of stress hormones and increase the body’s concentration of beta-endorphins, which control pain. Music can really relieve pain. Consequently, it is already used therapeutically in medicine in a wide variety of fields. It is especially useful in psychiatry and pain therapy.
It can also be a valuable aid in the rehabilitation of stroke patients and in geriatrics. Because making music can act like a fountain of youth on the brain, because new neural connections are being formed. Subjects such as mother tongue or mathematics are considered more important for integrating students into work life. But pilot projects have shown that music lessons contribute to children’s social development. In a long-term study in several primary schools, the social skills of the children involved improved significantly. The number of expelled students has decreased. At the same time, the proportion of children who did not receive a single refusal from classmates was twice as high as in ordinary schools. In addition, these schools had a noticeably calmer, less aggressive atmosphere.
How can this be explained? Music also trains the perception of others. And so children also learn, for example, to listen to the intonation of other people’s voices, by which they can judge a person’s mood.
Music can train memory. One reason for this is that music is made up of a huge amount of information presented at once. For example, the brain must recognize pitch and melody and compare them to each other.
In addition, he must record the chronological sequence of tones in the mastering studio. This leads to beats and rhythms. Simultaneously incoming tones must be sorted by chords. In addition, there is the location and type of sound source: anyone who hears music usually knows if drums or pianos are playing and where they are in the room.
Of course, the brain must first determine this through many measurements and comparisons. Some of these tasks are shared between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. By the way, for professional musicians this division is often the other way around – why is still unknown.
The brain of musicians differs from the brain of non-musicians in other ways as well. Particularly well developed are the areas that connect the activity of the hands with the activity of hearing and analysis. And this, in turn, shows that the activities associated with creating music, as well as listening to music, permanently change the brain. All new circuits that are created between the nerve cells in the brain through music remain with the person.
Therefore, it is also suggested that music can prevent the destruction of nerve cells in the brains of older people. Some areas of the brain that are affected in old age are more developed in musicians. In any case, music has a training effect on memory.
