Can intelligence be increased through exposure to music?
Music and brain development go hand in hand. Music is often use for simulating and improving both hemispheres of the brain. Research, as mentioned in softpedia, has shown that music training has significant influences on the brain development of young children.
Researchers found that the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with other skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visual-spatial processing, mathematics and intelligence.Music exposure should start as early as possible.
How can one do so you ask?Before birth and when a baby is born it has been recommended that classical music be played for them to listen. However, for most mother-to be and new moms it can be torturous on their ears if she is not a classical music lover.
What I recommend would be to listen to easy listening music or your favourite radio station. I remember feeling the more frequent kicks of my baby in tummy whenever I listened to a more upbeat catchy tune. It showed that even an unborn child can “react” to the vibrations that they feel from the radio waves.
When my children were born I exposed them to a variety of music.From classical, children’s songs, country & western, rock to different radio stations in different languages. I also sing and hum tunes to my babies while feeding them or playing with them during the day. I feel that it has helped to strengthen our mother child bond. Music helped to calm and soothe my child when he was a newborn suffering from colic.
The melodious tunes I sung to him helped ease both his anxiety and mine as he learnt to relax. From an intense and stressful mood to a more relax and peaceful one ,music has done wonders as a stress reliever for both parent and child.Exposure to music has helped in my elder child’s language development.It came out as “ Baa Baa Baa Baa SHEEP!” which sounded rather hillarious at that time. A cool attempt nevertheless for a child that age. He was extremely proud of himself and wasn’t shy to sing to us his rendition of the popular nursery rhyme. He also had fun making up his own words to the tunes of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ when he was much older.
If you do not have time or am shy to sing to your child as you are scared that you may sound out of tune there are many available resources for you.
Here are some that I recommend.
Websites which have Songs for kidshttp://kids.niehs.nih.gov/music.htmhttp://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/index.html
Music CDs Visit our Associate Store for a selection