Emotion, memory, and music all play an essential and vital part in the development of a person. Lets explore and discuss each one:
eMoTiOn:
How did you feel reading the word ‘eMoTiOn’ with the different uses of capitalization? You may have felt something a little bit different if you just saw the word “emotion” without any weird fancy way of spelling it. Your feelings may have changed because you experienced a small dose of emotion. If humans didn’t have emotion, then we would be considered robots. Emotion is what makes life exciting and fun! If you had no emotion, then you wouldn’t even know what exciting and fun feels like. In the movie, Equilibrium, you can see how much emotion affects a person, and how it can destroy one as well. Their sense of compassion and attachment had been prohibited. You can see that the lack of emotion can result in destruction and slaughter, which is morally wrong for a lot of people, however how is one to know it’s wrong if they didn’t have a sense of morality? Morality ties in with emotion because when you stand for something, it’s because you FEEL as though it’s the right thing to do.
Memory:
Memory is part of our cognition, which allows us to recall past events, remember the words to your favorite song, or to give your dog a bath. If we didn’t have memory, we would be even more forgetful than we already are today. Memories can trigger emotions as well as songs. Recently for our TOK class, we had to find songs that represented past events in our lives. I went through all of the songs I listened in middle school and SO MANY MEMORIES FLOODED MY MIND. Just because of a few songs I had listened to, I remembered a certain dance with a bunch of my closest friends back in middle school. I remembered exactly how I felt and everything that we did that night. Also, personally, music can help me memorize. I remember when Hannah Montana first came out and there was this one particular episode where she made up a song to help her pass a test in science class that had to do with all the bones in the body. From then on out I use different sounds and techniques to help me study.
Music:
Music is very much related to emotion. When you listen to a song you feel differently in each setting right? For instance, if you were listening to a love song, you probably would start thinking about how much you like this one guy, how you wish you had a guy, or you think of your boyfriend and how much you want to be with him right now, etc. Then all of a sudden a rap song comes on and your emotions totally take a 360 and now you’re feeling like a thug, then you turn up the bass in your car, roll down the windows, and start rapping. In the article “How does music affect us?”, Charles Darwin argued that music brought people together in a sexual way (being drawn to someone through seduction in a song), resulted in physical reaction (having goosebumps in a particular song), affected you intellectually (listening to Mozart), improved health (brings one out of depression), created habits (earworm-can’t stop listening to the same song), and affected moods, which are all TRUE. Music pulls many emotions out of us and bring out different people. It’s how you determine personalities and how you make new friends by bonding over music you both like.
All three of these parts help shape our lives as humans, and how we are able to thrive in our own lives and in others.
Something to think about:
What kind of person would you be without music?
~Ariel the Mermaid~ 