Music and Memory Work Together
to Produce Phenomenal Results!
When you combine music and memory in learning something new, there is much evidence that points to greater success in retaining the new information. The reason this is true is because there is a very orderly componant in the right kind of music that serves to clean up the unorganized parts in your brain, and make it better able to assimilate data.
Did you know that the human mind is capable of storing 2 raised to the 50 billionth power bits of information?1 If you wrote a 1 followed by a zero a second for the rest of your life, the resulting number would still not be big enough to describe the above number. This is incredible!
However, most of us never fully access the incredible powers of memory that we have. Why is this so? Too much work? How can music affect the mind so that we can release this power of data storage to work a little better?
Have you ever tried to memorize something, perhaps a Scripture passage, or a poem, only to find that you could not recall that poem or passage a month later without Herculian effort? Did it go in properly? Why won't it come back out?
In 1982, researchers set out to find the effect that combining music and memory would have in the retention of information. They chose 300 graduates and post graduates, all with PhDs. They split them into two groups. To the first group, they orally taught vocabulary words, with no other sound in the room. They did this by saying the word, then the definition. To the second group, they taught the same words in the same way, but added music in the background, particularly music from the Baroque and Classical periods.
The results, they found, were astounding. The disparity in the two groups of the recall of the vocabulary words was so great, that they did another test a few weeks later. The group that had not had music playing in the background could remember almost none of the words that had been taught a few weeks previously. The group that had the music in the background could remember almost all of the words.2
You can try this experiment with yourself or with your children.
Perhaps the reason why the right kind of music helps the learning process so dramatically is that by definition, it must be orderly. To listen to a baby pounding out notes on the piano is not music. Put those same notes in horizontal order, and now you have melody. Put them in vertical order, and now you have harmony. Put them in order through time, and now you have rhythm.
Music is a very complex system of moving sound through time, and it must be impeccibly ordered on three different planes; in melody, harmony, and rhythm.
The Baroque and Classical composers were especially concerned with orderly patterns and mathematics in music. Listening to music from these periods has a special power to "defragment" the bits of scattered data in the brain, and help in the retention of information.
But if there is this special music memory power just by listening to the right kind of music while learning, how much greater would it be if you actually memorized information to a song? This is how children learn their ABC's.
The Greeks understood the power of music to allow information to be retained in the the brain. That is why the great epics like the Iliad and the Odyssy were sung, not spoken.3
Memory is nothing more than the association of two different bits of information. The stronger the association, the stronger the memory, and the easier it is to recall.
Music is a wonderful and fun tool to associate information with. Click here to read about my own personal journey using
music and memory.
Our first CD is done! If you would like to hear sound samples of the King James Scriptures put to music,
click here.
Here is a link to a website that has free downloads for scripture songs:
www.scripturemelodies.com
1Miracle Memory, Tape 1, Lesson 1.
2Music and the Mind, audio lecture, Michael Ballam.
3Ibid.
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