Music can provide therapeutic benefits
When Bob Dylan turns another year older on May 24, the usual gaggle of journalists and Dylanophiles will report the news with the same sense of head-scratching, how-can-it-be wonderment they’ve expressed on Dylan’s birthday ever since America’s rock ’n’ roll poet laureate hit middle age. It’s as if, as a nation of nostalgia hounds, we simply can’t get our minds…
“Balance” is a word I use every day. Did you know we can achieve balance and the lives we want to live by changing how we think? I recently attended a workshop that helped me learn new ways to achieve balance, especially between my mind and my emotions. I flew to Carefree (yes, that’s a real place!), Arizona, to attend…
If you’re like us, you’re fascinated with memory—how it works, how to improve it, even how to deal with traumatic memories. Rewire Me explores these topics and more in these memorable articles: 1. Music and Memory: Why Some Songs Mean So Much to Us. How songs affect us depends on when we first hear them. 2. 6 Memory-Boosting Strategies That…
We live in a time when we tend to look so far ahead into the future that we may lose sight of what’s going on in our lives at the moment. I know I used to find myself running so far and so fast that I missed an entire year here and there. All that changed when I began meditating.…
Music is now a government-endorsed painkiller. This is not to say the Food and Drug Administration has approved rock, jazz, or hip-hop MP3 downloads as over-the-counter analgesics. But stretching beyond the labels of “alternative” or “complementary” healing techniques, music and sound have been studied and applied to patients in recent years in well-funded federal labs with impressive and verifiable results.…
As long as 42,000 years ago, homo sapiens were making music—and not just chanting and beating on their chests. Millennia before Man-the-toolmaker figured out the principles of the wheel or the lever, he was carving finger holes in bird bones and hollowed-out pieces of mammoth ivory and blowing through them. Archaeologists have recovered some of these amazing artifacts in southern…
