You Are What You Listen To

Can music really help you think better? Yes, according to research that has been done so far.

Listening to, and participating in music creates new neural pathways in your brain that stimulate creativity. Studies have shown that music actually trains brain for higher forms of thinking. There was a study at University of California, for example, about 10 years ago.

Researchers followed progress of three year olds, split into two groups. The first group had no particular training in, or exposure to music. The second group studied piano and sang daily in chorus.

After eight months musical three year olds were much better at solving puzzles. When tested, they also scored 80% higher in spatial intelligence than non musical group. With such a dramatic difference, there is bound to be more research like this in future.

There is also anectdotal evidence that listening to music, especially from Mozart's era, can help you study and learn better. Hopefully there will be research done to confirm or disprove this soon, but there is really no good reason not to do your own experimentation in this area. Stephen King writes with loud rock music playing, so maybe any benefits here are according to your own tastes or brain-organization.

Brainwave Entrainment

Want to listen to some music, and get smarter? There are a number of products out there that are based on an entirely different principle than research mentioned above. They rely on "entraining" your brainwaves, in order to put you in a meditative state.

The idea of “sacrifice” isn’t a pretty one—it’s a painful one! But it implies temporary pain for future gain. In our study of creating greater abundance, what do we have to sacrifice? We have to give up our old ways of thinking. That’s not easy, even if those old ways are hurting us. Old habits are comfortable. They’re familiar. We carry out habit, we know what’s going to happen. And it may not even be pleasant, but it’s predictable. What happens if we break habit? That’s problem…we don’t know what will happen, do we?

In our case, we’re sacrificing way we think about:

Money. If we think that “money is root of all evil,” how well are we going to attract it? If we think that rich people are somehow bad, are likely is it that we’ll become one? Sure, there are rich people with bad attitudes. There are those who got there on backs of others. There are those who take their financial success as a sign of superiority. But we know it doesn’t have to be that way.