Good Music not only heals the body but the soul too

Many music therapists have told that a Mozart symphony a day will keep the doctor away as the apples have lost their touch. Listening to Bach, Haydn or Mozart can help you to improve your mental abilities. It has already been proved that this kind of music not only helps cows give you more milk but also provides physical relief to patients who are suffering from numerous ailments. Neurologists have reported that music not only helps in soothing the soul but it also helps in providing relief to specific physical and mental symptoms in your body. Music therapy has been a part of the healing cultures for many centuries now. The Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, played music in order to help heal his patients faster. It was only few decades ago that medical institutions started harnessing the skills of musicians and took them around to hospitals where the wounded and ailing people were helped to come out of their physical and emotional trauma. Almost all universities in the Western World have music therapy departments. The university patients who are under the assessment of neurologists and psychologists are provided specific pieces of music which is loaded on to iPods or any other music storage device. A scientific study that made many people sit up and take notice was when Dr. Frances Rauscher at the University of Wisconsin found that subjects showed considerably better spatial and temporal reasoning skills after they were made to hear the A Major Adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. This study was done about two decades ago and was published in the `Nature’ Journal. This was popularly labelled as the Mozart Effect and it is being used in various non-musical applications ranging from classrooms to healing clinics. Spatial reasoning is a crucial area which is helpful for thought processing and thinking. It is the skill that people use when they are confronted by the complexity of the tasks they face in a selected time period. To cite an example, if you are told to fold a piece of paper into the shape of a boat in a limited amount of time, you will use spatial reasoning to move forward and will have to take a decision on whether you will begin by folding the left corner to start with or the corner to the right. How does good classical and spiritual music have an influential effect in the realm of spatial reasoning? It happens because of the progression of notes into a melody that can soothe and boost the nerves at the same time. A solo clarinet will not have the desired effect as much as an ensemble would be able to do. Music and organized music does have an effect on the organizational architecture of the cerebral cortex of the brain. Dr. A.K. Sharma is trying to bring music therapy into India. He advises patients suffering with migraine to listen to the second movement of Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. He realised that the patients became calmer after listening to the music and it helped alleviate their pain. Listening to classical music transforms your life. Your psychological horizons tend to expand and you start to like finer things in life. It helps to bring your stress levels down and also helps in controlling your pulse and heartbeat. It has also been proved that listening to classical music has increased the level of melatonin and, at the same time, reduces the levels of adrenaline and hypertension. In cases where there were problems in the normal growth of a fetus inside a womb, exposure to classical music helped show an improvement. When pregnant mothers listen to classical music, their babies inside tend to gain weight. This has been published in the `Science’ Journal. Classical music has had a positive effect on epileptic patients. The number of convulsions and their severity were reduced as indicated by Dr. John Jenkins from the University of London in 2001. People tend to listen to vulgar, chaotic and fast music which has continuous elementary beat to it. This music will increase the stress and tension in your life despite being hummable. It is music for entertainment of the body or for the shaking of legs and hips but it is definitely not for the nurturing of your soul.