The Magic of Music

Music just makes everything better. Feeling down and tired, try something loud and upbeat. I bet you start feeling better by the chorus. Nervous and jittery? How about a soothing acoustic guitar ballad to calm you right down. If you can't sleep because your mind is going a mile a minute and even counting sheep makes you think of another thing undone on your to do list, try something peaceful like pan flutes or soft piano music played over the sounds of nature. As long as it isn't something your brain is completely familiar with (so it doesn't stay hyped up trying to anticipate words or rhythms) you should be able to drift right off to sleep. It even lowers our blood pressure! Altering our moods and body functions is only part of the magic of music.

The most amazing part of music to me is it lets me time travel. Not in the Dr. Who way of course, but certain songs can trigger memories so detailed that for a brief time I feel I am right there again. And it isn't just me and I'm not crazy. There is scientific proof of this:

"What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head." said Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis. "It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person's face in your mind's eye."  http://www.livescience.com/5327-music-memory-connection-brain.html  If you'd like to read more about this phenomenon.

Anyway, an example.

While driving around yesterday with my daughter, I put a Billy Idol CD into the stereo. I hadn't listened to it for a while. When it reached this song, "Mony, Mony", I was, for a moment, younger than my daughter! I was 19 years old and out visiting with my friend Marsha, it was one of the last couple of times we saw each other. We were at the All Ranks Club at Camp Pendleton in California. We're out there on the dance floor dancing to this song and having fun when all of a sudden we hear this loud yell. It was almost a battle cry, maybe it was his version of a "Rebel Yell", who knows. We look over just in time to see a guy running, leap-frogging over several people and landing on the dance floor right in front of us. He and Marsha spent the rest of the evening together, in fact, I believe she married him.

I've lost touch with Marsha and her family. I do think of her often and wonder how her life turned out in these last OMG! 30 years. But this song and a few other memories always take me back to a time when we thought we owned the world.