Music designed to boost physical, spiritual health
By Peter Elliott | Contributing Editor of Everyday Christian
Posted 8:17 am on July 07, 2009
Research has shown that music has a profound effect on your body and psyche. In fact, there’s a growing field of health care known as music therapy, which uses music to heal. Music therapy can help with pain management, ward off depression, promote movement, calm patients and ease muscle tension.
Music is thought to link all of the emotional, spiritual, and physical elements of the universe. Music can be used to change a person’s mood, and has been found to cause like physical responses in many people simultaneously.
In the 1973 classic, The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird devote a whole chapter on how music affects plants, called “The Harmonic Life of Plants.”
However, do different styles of music have negative effects on the mind, body and soul?
Over 10 years ago David Merrill divided 72 mice into three groups: one tested a mouse’s response to hard rock, one to the music of Mozart and the final group had no exposure to any music, rock or classical.
After getting the mice accustomed to living in aquariums in his basement, he began playing music 10 hours a day. Merrill put each mouse through a maze, three times a week. Prior to musical exposure, the mice averaged 10 minutes to complete the course.
Over time, the group of musically restricted mice, managed to cut approximately 5 minutes from their maze-completion time. The Mozart-listening mice cut 8 ½ minutes.
The hard-rocking mice added 20 minutes to their time, making their average maze-running time 300 percent more than their original average.
Merrill told the Associated Press that he attempted the experiment the year before, allowing mice in the different groups to live together.
“I had to cut my project short because all the hard-rock mice killed each other,” Merrill said. “None of the classical mice did that.”
I think that explains why I’ve become so abnormal over the years ... stupid rock music, go figure!
However, not everyone who listens to rock will become a mass murderer.
Lyrical content will do far more damage than music. Today’s mainstream lyrics are far less censored than past decades. The sexual content is more explicit.
Unless you live on an isolated island, without satellite, our children will be exposed to negative lyrics and a morally twisted society.
Make an effort to share the Christian music - or perhaps the Mozart - you enjoy listening to with your kids.
Expose them to a different approach and a God that can carry us over the maze.
Tags: Christian music, David Merrill, health
Peter Elliott is a veteran news and sports journalist. He enjoys interviewing others about how God works in their lives and sharing that with readers. He is also a lifelong, long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan. He resides in Indianapolis with his wife and three sons.
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