Mozart

How did you go with Pachelbel’s Canon? I’ve got a new composer this time around. Try out Mozart. Let me know what you think. As well as a composer, Mozart loved math. His sister used to say that he was fascinated by numbers. He wrote a piece called The Magic Flute. It has a repeated pattern of three notes.

Our brains are hooked up to our limbic system. It handles feelings and memories. You remember times that made you happy or sad. That’s because you put an emotion with the event. Our amygdala puts an emotion on the memory and then hands it to the hippocampus for storage.

A great day at the beach? The sun was shining, the water was great, you had an ice cream, and you didn’t want to go home. You felt happy. The feeling of happiness was joined to the memories, and you can recall them easily.

Our limbic system handles all of that stuff for us. It decides the feelings we attach to which memories. Mozart’s music can switch on our limbic system. The music won’t make us instant geniuses (sorry, no musical piece will do that). It will calm our brain enough to let helpful memories in.

Storing memories is what learning is all about. You remember things so you can use them later. Calming music helps that process. Could you ask your teacher to play some Mozart during class time? Better still, ask them to read this blog!