In Sync

Music could hold the key to improving student engagement and learning.
Could listening to music before classroom tasks enhance the social and emotional bonds of students, enhance cognitive function and improve the overall health and wellbeing of our kids?

Music influences our thoughts, feelings and emotions, and it can also increase our ability to consolidate and store memories, learn new things and increase our social and emotional intelligence. When infant children are exposed to music with play, studies show their speech patterns, theory of mind and the ability to predict rhythms are enhanced.

Sharing music, making music and dancing with music makes us closer in physical proximity but it also means our brains are closer too. Science proves that the quality of music we listen to, sharing the listening experience and making music brings us closer together by syncing our brain waves, changing our chemistry and helping us work in unison.

Music And Dementia

In 2014 the film ‘Alive Inside’ chronicled the lives of Dementia patients in care homes that were given Ipods with their choice of music to listen to in an attempt to see whether music can help retrieve memories and stimulate communication.

The result was startling as Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett along with a team of  healthcare mavericks including Dan Cohen, founder of the Music and Mind Foundation watched patients previously locked in the minds, inert and silent suddenly light up and begin singing along to their music.

In the moments after listening to familiar songs the patients were able to retrieve memories long forgotten, sing songs and remember lyrics and communicate verbally after being completely silent and unmoved for years.

This documentary spearheaded research into how music activates areas of the brain associated with memory and emotion. Scientists know that music has the potential to increase working memory and in the case of dementia patients help in the retrieval of memories, the management of behavioural problems and can assist with coordination, verbal communication, cognition and overall wellbeing.

Two Minds Really Do Think Alike

Suzanne Dikker cognitive neuroscientist explores the interaction between art, concentration and mental synchronicity to understand our social connections and our behaviour.

Her projects include the use of EEG ( electroencephalogram ) to study the brains of high school students. She discovers that students who’s brain waves are in synch feel a greater sense of wellbeing in the classroom, perform better cogntively and show high classroom engagement.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_ways_music_strengthens_social_bonds

It Took The Whole Universe…

Part 1: You, me and everything in between

If you ever have that indefinable feeling of loneliness, hopelessness and isolation, just look to the stars and know that you and I are the same as them and it took the whole universe to make you.

Biologically speaking from the smallest microbe to the largest mammal, all the enzymes that make up our genetics are the same as theirs. Just four proteins referred to as, ATCG, (Adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine are the four nucleotides found in DNA ) are what create the myriad of life on our blue planet.

Our DNA which made up of four main atoms; hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen are elements forged in the fire of the virgin universe some 13.8 billion years ago.  Somehow stardust spread throughout two trillion galaxies, coalesced into finite order to create you.

When we pull apart the universe strangely it too carried the equation of four final components; everything that exists within it, including the planets, people, galaxies, gases and stars is made from tiny zipping particles and they are the up quark, the down quark, electron and the neutrino.

Beyond it’s four tiny constiuents the universe is a field of energy which exists where nothing else can. It moves like a liquid, and it cannot be created or destroyed, has no known origin and does not stop moving. This field of infinite possibility is called the Quantum Field, and the physics that confirms it’s existence are our most reliable model for reality ever.

This field permeates everything in the universe, including you and me. Particles that exist within the field bundle together to create matter and this is where you and I and everything else resides as tiny bundles of particles packaged together floating in a field of energy.

The fact that you and I exist at all is extraordinary, given we are just bundles of energy packaged together, conscious, creative and alive. What makes this aliveness is something of a mystery, how it exists and why, an even bigger one and trying to figure it out may never happen so in the meantime – as the once great Sufi Poet, Rumi said, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment”…

Used for millennia as a gateway to self-mastery and a tool for self-healing, self-awareness and self-realisation, the breath sits at the centre of what determines real, and unreal. Harnessing the breath gives you the power to reshape the mind and body, bend space and time and extend your life.

Most of us never pay attention to the way we breathe and haven’t the faintest clue that the way we breathe impacts every single facet of our life on earth. From how well our body functions, to our moods, our chemistry, our relationships and the career we choose; our breath is a compass for the direction we take in life.

When you breathe your body takes in vital oxygen which ignites the cells in your body – helping them to release energy and drive the activities of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

The balance of the inhalation and the exhalation is vital to the stability of the brain and the body and your life – because your internal imbalances become your external ones as well – a balanced breath keeps a balanced mind.

Pranayama is as an esoteric and energetic practice with a range of techniques that enhance your physiology and your psychology. Some methods can warm you up, cool you down, keep you alert, put you to sleep and keep you alive without the need for food and water.

Pranic practices have the potential to alter your sensory perceptions, your biology and keep you in suspended animation – with some yogis like Sadguru, sitting for 12 days in a trance without food and water. Along with the potential to transcend the mind and the physical body – Pranayama practices have the potential to upgrade your mental software, increasing your intelligence and your awareness and lead you to the path of spiritual enlightenment.

The Science of The Yogic Breath

Sundar Balasubramanian | TEDxCharleston

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIfwbEvXtwo&list=PL9uvtvecXuuAMLT2S66K8k3bRTAd9DEIP

Rather than examining what takes your breath away, Sundar Balasubramanian, a radiation oncology researcher studies what breath gives you. A deep breath relaxes, and he explains it creates significant beneficial changes in physiologically relevant biomarkers.