From my readings for class:
Music makes a mark on your brain/body. The musical pattern acts as a trigger for emotions
and thoughts. You have heard about Elder Packer telling you to sing a hymn when your
thoughts are no quite where they should be. There is great wisdom in this advice. The singing
will change your neural patterns involved in emotions, thoughts, and behavior. The music
marker helps to reason clearly based on emotions. This may sound strange, but emotions are
not disconnected from reason. The idea that they are separate comes from the philosophy of
Descartes, an influential Frenchman, and from others before him, such as Plato. We will not
get into a deep analysis of those philosophies. Let’s just be content that neuropsychology has
shown that when persons are not able to feel emotions, they are also incapable of reasoning
properly (see the work of Dr. Damasio and Mr. Phineas Gage case). This is very pertinent
because music creates powerful emotions among the general population (Grabrielson and
Lindstrom, 1993). In fact, Frey (1985) showed that in a sample of adults, about 8% of the
crying episodes in their life were caused by music alone. You can look at this way: let’s say
you cry 10 times this year; about 1 time out of 10, the crying will happen while/because your
are listening to a musical piece.
Isn't that interesting?
So I looked up some research:
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/10/3/295
The Emotional Mechanism that Biases Decision Making is Distinct from the Emotional Mechanism that Improves Memory
The previous discussion leads to the question of whether the mechanism by which emotion improves memory is the same as, or different from, the mechanism through which emotion biases decisions. The amygdala has been found to be necessary for emotions to improve memory (Cahill et al., 1995
). Our own work has also shown that the amygdala is important in the creation of biases and in decision making (Bechara et al., 1999a). This suggests that in the amygdala, the mechanisms through which emotion modulates memory and decision making may be inseparable. The remaining question is whether these mechanisms might be separable in the VM cortex. In order to answer this last question, we tested 12 normal control subjects and six VM patients with anterior lesions that spared the basal forebrain for their memory of a series of neutral and emotionally charged pictures. The series of pictures involved four sets, with four pictures in each set. Each set of four pictures contained two neutral (e.g. farm scenes)and two emotional (e.g. raped and mutilated bodies') pictures. The pictures in set 1 were presented once each; those in set 2 were presented twice each; in set 3, four times each; and in set 4, eight times each. Five minutes after viewing all the pictures, subjects were tested for their recall of each picture they saw, and for the overall content of the picture. The recall of picture content was calculated for each subject as a function of repetition times and emotional content.
As might be expected, both normal controls and VM patients showed improved memory as a result of repetition. The most important finding, however, was that both groups showed a response to the emotion manipulation, producing a better memory curve for pictures with emotional content than for neutral pictures (Fig. 8). Thus, this experiment actually separated the memory curve that is a function of repetition from the curve that is a function of emotional content. The results indicate that the VM patients are able to use emotional content in order to enhance their memory, suggesting that the mechanism through which emotion modulates decision making is different from that through which emotion modulates memory. These results also support the conclusion that the decision-making impairment of VM patients cannot be explained by a deficit in the recall of emotional events.
