THE MYSTICAL MUSIC

Songs from the past can stir powerful emotions and transport us back in time. This is an experience shared by everyone: hear a piece of music from decades later and you are transported back to that particular moment, like stepping into a time machine. You can feel everything as if you were actually there. The relationship between music and memory is powerful, and new research projects are hoping to discover how these memories work for therapeutic effect. It is already used to help dementia patients, the elderly, and those suffering from depression.

We teenagers already know the power of music. It comforts us when we are down, lightens us when we are struggling in the dark, and gives us the sort of company that is on a completely new level. Music is probably the most extraordinary magician for the magic it works on our brains. Let us see what psychologists have to say about the mystical power of music.

The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two large areas in the brain associated with memory and they take in a great deal of information every minute. Retrieving it is not always easy. Music helps because it provides a rhythm and rhyme and sometimes alliteration which helps to unlock that information with cues. It is the structure of the song that helps us to remember it, as well as the melody and the images the words provoke.

However complex, it may sound, music has its way with things.

“Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and sensual life,” said Ludwig Beethoven and I cannot agree more!