Playing music benefits your brain

Neuroscientists have discovered a wonderful new correlation between playing music and activities in the brain. Turns out that when you play music, multiple areas of the brain light up simultaneously processing different areas of the brain in intricate, interrelated, astonishingly fast sequences.

“While listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the equivalent to a full body workout.”

The theory is that playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once. Especially the visual, auditory and motor cortices. When you combine that with disciplined, structured practice, the idea is that this strengthens brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities.

So unlike the action of simply listening to music, playing music allows us to use fine motor skills which which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision in which the left hemisphere is more involved with the novel and creative content that the right hemisphere excels in.

For this reasons playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings.

Musicians often have higher levels of executive functions

Because music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive functions, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing and attention to detail, and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work.

Musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions: creating, storing and retrieving memory more quickly and efficiently.

Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connective brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag….like a good internet search engine.

So how do we know that all these benefits are unique to music?

Neuroscientists have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activities, including other arts.

Insights from this blog were gleaned from Anita Collins.

How playing an instrument benefits your brain – Anita Collins

 

How To Make Your Brand A Sticky Brand

Sticky Branding is an action-oriented branding playbook, complete with exercises at the end of each chapter.

“Sticky brands don’t behave like faceless companies. They stand out because they reveal their personality, share their opinions, and build real customer relationships.”

Jeremy Miller identifies principles that can make any company stand out. These include concepts like Simple Clarity – one of the foundations of a sticky brand. It’s simple: Jeremy Miller says that when people understand you, they are more likely to buy from you.

The 5 Words You Want To Hear A Customer Say

“That’s interesting. Tell me more.”

There are lots of wonderful insights in the book that even small business can apply if they are keen to turn their brand into a sticky brand. The advantage of Sticky Brands is that they can cut through the clutter of their market and engage their customers with Brand storylines – stories that engage them in a conversation and build relationships.

The value of a Sticky Brand is sales. Sticky Brands, according to Jeremy Miller, sell more, faster – provided they are purposeful with their resources. And, isn’t this what we are all after? He recognizes that small- and mid-sized companies don’t have vast marketing budgets and resources to move the sales needle. To drive sales and grow a sticky brand, he recommends you focus on one priority at a time: Volume, Velocity, or Value.

Jeremy Miller’s Sticky Branding is a book that one will have to pick up over and over again to be constantly reminded of the importance of a brand. There is so much here. It’s a textbook written for real life results.

“There will always, one can assume, be the need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
~ Peter Drucker, management guru