Every Moment Has A Song

(via mental floss)

by Jessica Hullinger

Music is a splendid thing. It can cheer you up when you’re sad, make you dance like a fool, and allow you to drown out the world when you need to. But music has its scientific uses, too. The documentary Alive Inside details how dementia patients react positively when given iPods filled with their old favorite songs. The music seems to help them “come alive” again. While listening to familiar songs, many of the documentary’s patients can sing along, answer questions about their past, and even carry on brief conversations with others.

“Music imprints itself on the brain deeper than any other human experience,” says neurologist Oliver Sacks, who appears in the film. “Music evokes emotion, and emotion can bring with it memory.”

The documentary follows recent studies showing that music can improve the memories of dementia patients, and even help them develop new memories.

Here, a look at some other things music has been known to “cure”:

1. Low Birth Weight

Babies born too early often require extended stays in the hospital to help them gain weight and strength. To help facilitate this process, many hospitals turn to music. A team of Canadian researchers found that playing music to preemies reduced their pain levels and encouraged better feeding habits, which in turn helped with weight-gain. Hospitals use musical instruments to mimic the sounds of a mother’s heartbeat and womb to lull premature babies to sleep. Researchers also say that playing calming Mozart to premature infants significantly reduces the amount of energy they expend, which allows them gain weight.

It “makes you wonder whether neonatal intensive care units should consider music exposure as standard practice for at-risk infants,” says Dr. Nestor Lopez-Duran at child-psych.org.

2. Droopy Plants

If music helps babies grow, can it do the same thing for plants? Dorothy Retallack says yes. She wrote a book in 1973 called The Sound of Music and Plants, which detailed the effects of music on plant growth. Retallack played rock music to one group of plants and easy listening music to another, identical group. At the end of the study, the ‘easy listening’ plants were uniform in size, full and green, and were even leaning toward the source of the music. The rock music plants had grown tall, but they were droopy, with faded leaves, and were leaning away from the radio.

Read more: http://mentalfloss.com/article/30649/11-problems-music-can-solve

“I Think I Love You” outsold the Beatles’ “Let it Be” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in 1970 for a very good reason: it too was a great song.

The Partridge Family brought not only high-quality bubblegum music into American households in the early 70’s, but plenty of moral lessons (“You can’t expect to go through life having things given to you, you have to work for what you really want”, “We never quite outgrow making mistakes”, “Almost everything we know is learned by trial an error”, “Tracy, don’t put that drumstick up your nose!”)

Enjoy the stories of the hits, the misses (that kid who played Chris for one season) the bloopers, the singers behind the singers, and the family behind the family.

There was nothing better than being together–until the network puts you in a Saturday evening time slot opposite All in the Family and chokes out your ratings…