Music; how does it affect you?
by Elizabeth Seaward
Music, each one of us has a favorite genre of music. We all will swear our favorite is the “best” or the “right” music to listen to, but are certain types of music better than others? How can we really know how our music affects our bodies and minds? Which genre of music is truly the “best” for our minds? Which music could be harmful to our health?
Take for instance classical music versus hard rock music; scientifically can we truly determine how it affects us? We can. You may have heard of the studies in which plants are subject to long hours of classical and hard rock music or heavy metal. The results of these tests have always been the same, the hard rock and/or heavy metal music caused the plants growth to deteriorate. Classical music however helped the plants grow faster.
A similar experiment has been done with mice. David Merrell, a high school student in Suffolk, Virginia won first prize in the state science fair for his science project to determine the effect of music on lab mice. He created a maze that took mice about 10 minutes to negotiate. Then Merrell played classical music to one group of mice and hard rock music to another for 10 hours a day. After three weeks, the mice exposed to the classical music made it though the maze in 90 seconds. The rock music group took 30 minutes. Merrell added, “I had to cut my science project short because all the hard rock mice killed each other. None of the classical music mice did that.” Not only did the rock mice take longer, something in the music caused them to kill each other! While the classical mice benefited from the music, the others wound up dead.
How do you take this information and apply it to humans? Will people who listen to hard rock or heavy metal music end up killing each other? The answer may surprise you. One of the greatest causes of sensor neural deafness in the youth of our nation is their addiction to the violent and harsh sounds of hard rock and heavy metal music. The damage to the sense of hearing is great, yet the hard rock music may cause even greater harm to the mind.
The pulsating jungle beat and syncopated rhythms of rock music cause a phenomenon known as nerve jamming, which is similar to hypnosis. A person under the influence of the sound and beat of rock music loses conscious control of himself and is open to manipulation by the rock musicians with their messages of drugs, immorality, and violence: the listener’s mind is no longer in control of his body. Prolonged exposure to rock music affects a person’s subconscious mind. Listening to rock music is, therefore, morally and spiritually harmful as well as physically and mentally damaging. (BJU publications)The key vehicle for hypnosis is repetition. When being hypnotized the subject is generally asked to say a phrase repeatedly until they lose control of their conscious mind. When under hypnosis people have little or no control over their actions, often the experience is not remembered. The evidence of hypnosis through hard rock and heavy metal music is terrifying. In San Antonio, Texas, a sixteen-year-old boy while listening to Pink Floyd’s album *The Wall*, went into a trancelike state. Without warning, he suddenly jumped up and brutally stabbed his aunt to death. According to the police report, there were no drugs involved — Just the music! The boy claimed the music hypnotized him and he does not even remember the killing! Associated press. The dangers and the power of such music should not be underestimated. While hard rock and heavy metal music can damage the mind and soul, classical music has been proven to regenerate brain cells, sooth and relax the body. It is often used in music therapy to aid in the healing process. Just as it help plants to grow and mice to navigate mazes; The College Entrance Examination Board reported in 1996 that students with experience in musical performance scored 31 points higher on the verbal part of the SAT and 39 points higher on the math section than the national average. Preschoolers who studied piano performed 34% better in spatial and temporal reasoning ability than preschoolers who spent the same amount of time learning to use computers. -Rauscher and Shaw February 1997 The effects of classical music are positive and encouraging.
The effects of both hard rock and classical music are extremely powerful, yet as different as light and darkness. We can choose to strengthen our minds with classical music and reap the benefits of a higher IQ and clearer thoughts. Or we can muddy the waters of our brain with the dark thoughts and hypnotic powers of hard rock and heavy metal music. The choice is yours.
Print this article ');
print ('
Email this article to a friend ');
?>
Discuss this article (' . $comments_message . ')');
print ('