Music and memory

Carnival 2019 is over. The hundreds of events leading up to Carnival Monday and Tuesday, and the two days of gay abandonment on the streets of TT are now just a memory. But the lyrics to the music, especially the more popular soca songs, are stuck in the mind. "I want you to find your way everybody on stage Oh lad oh If you coming down from the mountains oh gad oh When the riddim beating in town See we jumping on D savannah grass, d savannah grass" I heard a little voice coming from the back seat of the car on Friday morning on my way to school drop off. It used to amaze me how my son, like most children I encounter, can commit the lyrics of so many songs to memory in the space of a few months with no effort, yet struggles with Math formulas and Grammar rules he has been learning over longer periods. It was only when I read an article on the universityhealthnews.com website that I understood the connection between music and memory. "As we listen to or perform music, neural pathways all over our brain light up. In fact, nearly every region of the brain is involved in musical activities. Music stimulates connections between both sides of the brain and activates brain areas associated with emotional, cognitive, and memory processing," the article said. "If you hear a new piece of vocabulary in a song, you learn it in a context; and that makes it easier to remember. Learning songs for children is a great way to remember things like colours, numbers, and parts of the body. Pop songs can be a fun way to learn idioms, expressions and phrasal verbs too," an article in englishlive.ef.com said. Can you imagine what could […]

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