Music and Memory
During this spring semester at Loras college I am finishing with a total of 12 credits hopefully. The courses I took this semester were mostly all Psychology based classes except for one english writing class now this doesn’t seem like a hard semester but for me it was one of the hardest. The weather changing had a huge impact on my work and my work ethic and I saw that in the beginning of the semester when all my first test scores came back. Like most college classes the first exam is more of a shot in the dark and hope for the best kind of situation and this set of exams were no exception to the rule. Most of my classes i had new teachers and i could only base their exams on word of mouth and yet i couldn’t find an exact answer to my question on how these teachers graded. Most of the classes had teachers nice enough to make a study guide or tell us what to study and basically it was handed to me on a silver platter it should have been easy As. Yet I thought being active in class was enough to get a passing grade on the exams so I didn’t study or if I i did it was a brief cram before the exam. It wasn’t enough due to failing almost all of my first exams.
After learning about memory and what short term memory was all about I could see the fault in my plan to cram before the exams. Short term memory has three key aspects according to the model proposed by Atkinson-Shiffrin. This model states that information is processed as Input- short term memory- then long term memory. This is then broke down into encoding, Capacity which concerns how much information can be stored the magic number 7 plays a role in this, and finally Duration and this refers to the period of time information can last in the memory stores. In order for information to come it it has to be at least ¼ to ½ second long and has to be some type of sensory experience and then be sense specific. For the information to be stored in the STM part of the brain it will last anywhere from 0 seconds to 18 and the capacity is somewhere between 7–2 items of information. This is where chunking can be used as a study technique with learning terms and or answers for the exams. If the information gets into the long term memory it’s there forever the only thing that changes is our ability to recall that information. We might need the help of some triggers like my other study tip which is music.
Memory that make it into the long term memory can be hard to remember if it’s when you under some type of stress. That’s why there are hundreds of study tips like make sure to write in only blue ink or chewing gum during the exam and many more weird and somewhat tempting to try and do but is it all a placebo effect. The Mozart effect which was developed in the early 1990s and it was stated that students who listened to Mozart before an exam or while studying got smarter. Now this was due to some students records showing an increase of 9 points on a IQ test. Yet some research like one done by Charbris done at Harvard showed that it wasn’t true. After doing 16 studies on 714 people he found that there was no significant rise in the participants IQ scores. For myself and my study habits I was trying to recreate something more like a flashbulb memory trigger with certain songs / albums.
For each class is was a bit different i didn’t want to use the same album for each study session and that wasn’t working. I would get tired and bored of the music so each class got an album. Psy 332 L&C the album of choice was The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem, for developmental psychology the album of choice was Russ There’s Really A Wolf, for Abnormal Psych it was Awaken, My Love by Childish Gambino which is more of a R&B album than a rap album. Now the music would be on repeat and constantly playing every time i studied course material, read notes, studied the power point or anything that had to do with the class the album of choice was playing. The average study time for each class was about two hours a day and this was mostly for test studying and homework time. Some days the music was played over a speaker where it was more of a background song and there were days where it was directly into my ears with the use of headphones. The goal of this wasnt to learn all the songs and lyrics by heart but what i was hoping to trigger was a reaction in my brain sort of like a flashbulb memory. Flashbulb memories and a connect with emotion and attention. Emotion and attention are tied together with the link of if a person likes something a lot then there attention goes up and we can then retain more information and using the music to act as the trigger for our emotions. The flashbulb memory was trying to show that the strong link of music and emotions with our attention to the material we study would cause us to get a flood of information as the album plays.
The second set of exams came and it was time to study i kept the same study time of 2 hours a day and conducted the music that was chosen. Over all I started to learn each song little by little and eventually after the whole semester i became very fond of each artist and now when i hear them i think about the album then the things i studied. The answers for the exam where flying out of my brain onto the paper but what was happening is that i would remember more context clues to help me narrow down the answer with certain parts of the songs i would remember or connect the dots on certain questions. There were also times where i need to come back to a question because I was only remembering the beginning album study material. My over all grades were a huge improvement over my first set of exams and this is due to the fact that I have a strange connection of emotion to each artist and album. “Emotion helps shape information gathering, such that motivational relevant items receive heightened attention (Lang and Davis, 2006).” the more I like the music the more i can remember another tip i learned was to study in small chunks and try to go over the material multiple times repetition and persistence. For the third set of exams my grades were my best so far and by the time I told this test i was starting to become almost perfect with what i listened to.
I am a strong believer in using music to study and its ability to help recall information solely depends on your taste and love of music. Also the possibility of learning an instrument can greatly improve your minds ability to learn and make you smarter. Kids who were trying to get tested with the Mozart effect actually had the music background in the lives and they scored slightly higher and the ability to recall information was higher with them than those who dont play an instrument.
For next semester I am taking the same amount of classes and learning to play the piano. I should do a lot better than this semester and if i start off strong then there is no stopping my grades from going up and up. With conunuting the listening of music i love and have a interest in my ability to recall information while hearing it should be better than it was before.