Music is in Your Mind

Music and Learning

            Music really does aid in learning, especially in retention of information. At the University of North Texas, researchers performed a test to see if music could help in the memorization of vocabulary words. The researchers split the test subjects (who were all postgraduate students) into three separate groups. All three groups had to take the same tests (there were three tests: one pretest, one posttest, and a test two weeks after the first two tests). Group one had the vocabulary words read to them while Handel’s Water Music was being played in the background. They were also told to imagine the words. The second group was read the words with the same music being played in the background but no one told them to imagine the words. The third group was neither instructed to imagine the words nor did they have music in the background when the list was read to them. The first and second groups did significantly better than the third group on the first two tests and the first group did much better than either of the other two groups on the last test. The first test was given the day the words were read to the subjects. The second test was given one week later. The last test was given two full weeks after the words had been read to the subjects. You are not guaranteed, however, to remember information simply by listening to music when you try to learn it. Rather, there is just a much higher chance that you will be able to recall it. That is because of the music being encoded at the same time as the information. This means that it’s even better to listen to music (better still to the same music as when you learned it) while you try to recall the information later. That’s why you can hear a song and remember an event where you heard it or friends you heard it with even years later.