Can Music Affect Overall Wellness?
There are numerous studies that making music, regardless of age, has a very positive effect on our health, wellness, and well-being. Talent and motivation play a minor role in this. The benefits generally occur when you learn and play an instrument. Even babies in the womb benefit when the mother listens to music or plays an instrument herself. They measured significantly stronger brain current patterns than children who were not exposed to any musical influence.
In young children, making music has a positive effect on their ability to perceive, speak, read and write, as well as on their computational skills. Other positive effects can be seen in performance, creativity, personality development, physical development, and general well-being.
Neurologists have studied how the brain reacts to music. Among other things, different brain regions were scanned and the neural centers, which are stimulated during music making, were shown on a kind of “map”. It turned out that the different areas of the brain are linked to certain sounds and patterns. In music-making, new links are formed that can help children develop their linguistic and grammatical skills. In particular, the left hemisphere of the brain, in which the language center is located, is trained by music.
Music makes you smart
The connection between music exercises and spatial thinking, i.e. how the brain recognizes and uses patterns, is the result of a study by US psychologist Frances H. Rauscher of the University of California, Irvine, which shows that people can better solve spatial tasks if they have heard classical music before. This also leads to the assumption that a degree in music and mathematics are closely linked, since the same thought processes, especially the spatial imagination, are used to deal with a mathematical problem. Just as music deals with certain patterns such as chords and tonal sequences, certain patterns are also used in mathematics to solve a certain problem with them.
Music is social
There are positive effects of making music that affects not only the musician himself but also his family and his fellow human beings. Making music together with people of different ages strengthens the sense of community, mutual respect, a sense of responsibility, and mutual trust, especially among youths.
Singing improves overall wellness
Singing also has an immediate positive effect on people: it lifts the mood and reduces physical and mental tension. For example, de cortisol content in the saliva of singers was measured before and after a choir rehearsal. Singing together led to an increase in cortisol and other chemical substances that boost well-being, improve immune defenses and lift the emotional state.
The same experiment was carried out in parallel with another group, who only listened and did not sing along. They measured a decrease in cortisol content. This positive effect has singing into old age. This was shown when people beyond the age of 80 who had participated in a singing program were compared to a control group. The result was astounding because the active singers consistently had a better physical constitution, were less susceptible to illness, went to the doctor less often, and maintained their social contacts much more actively.
