Music Makes You Relax

Why do we feel relaxed or happy when we listen to music? Children age two to five start to develop the feeling of "shyness". Even when the child is on mother's lap, any stranger getting really close, will make him feel perplexed and become very tense. However, if there is some music playing, this tension will be released and the child will feel more comfortable. Music helps loosen tension and that is why you feel relaxed and happy when you listen to music.

Good music enriches your imagination.

Human beings have the instinct to search for someone to be together with. When you are a child, it is your parents that are always with you.

But as you get older and become independent, you start looking for someone else. But at first, you are very lonely like Linus in the "Snoopy" cartoon. There is a certain period when you always have to carry something. Linus feels comfortable holding the blanket all the time because he is imagining the soft and smooth feeling of Mother's skin from the blanket. Music is the same as this blanket. It is said that music reminds children of Mother's voice and heartbeat. As this makes them feel comfortable, it is done repeatedly. And in doing so, their ability to imagine things develops.

This is why it can be said that music will help enrich your imagination.

Music helps children acquire the ability to concentrate, excites their curiosity and develops positiveness.

There are two ways of listening to music. One is to listen carefully and the other is to just have sound in the background and not pay any attention to it. When children are listening to music carefully, they are trying to find something in the music and their mind will work in a positive way.

Normally, when you are trying to find something, you will have to concentrate. By doing this over and over again, the ability to concentrate will develop, and will stimulate and excite curiosity even more. It is the same with music. When children listen to music carefully, it helps the development of positiveness.

With this positiveness and sense of relaxation, you will, without even knowing it, develop the tendency to become friends with others through music.

Yutaka Ono

Profile: Born in 1950, Ehime Prefecture. Graduated from Keio University, Medical Department. After having worked in the Department of Neuropsychiatry of the same university, went to Cornell and Pennsylvania University, U.S.A.
At present, the chief of the Outpatient Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keio Hospital, Tokyo.