Whilst carrying out research on the effects of music and the uptake of information, I’ve come across a noteworthy article from a few years back on the CNN News website by Elizabeth Landau, entitled “Music: It’s in your head, changing your brain”.
The piece highlights how music helps kids remember basic facts, partly because songs tap into fundamental systems in our brain that are sensitive to melody and beat.
Quoted in the article, Dr. Charles Limb, associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins University says “"I think there's enough evidence to say that musical experience, musical exposure, musical training, all of those things change your brain. It allows you to think in a way that you used to not think, and it also trains a lot of other cognitive facilities that have nothing to do with music."
This is what We, at Learnthrumusic, have been saying all along, music is a fantastic tool both for aiding the recall of pieces of information and for opening up other cognitive functions making GCSE revision easier.
More interesting still is the anthropological and evolutionary biology arguments that “"The structures that respond to music in the brain evolved earlier than the structures that respond to language,". It is also pointed out that out our ancestors used music to help them remember things, such as how to prepare certain foods and where the nearest water source was located, long before the advent of the first writing systems.
I highly recommend you take a full look at this fascinating article, I guarantee it’ll change the way you think about music and help you realise the positive and often unknown effects this as had on our evolution and on our current daily lives.
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