You say Love is a temple/Love a higher law/You ask me to enter but then you make me crawl/and I can’t be holding on to what you got/When all you got is hurt/One Love/One blood, you got to do what you should/One life, with each other/Sisters and Brothers...
U2 resonates in our hearts when we listen to the lyrics of their song One Love, and, psycho-social studies show that learning music also facilitates learning other subjects in school and enhances skills that children inevitably use in other areas.
According to the Neuroscience of Music, its lyrics always move us, and a brain region associated with bodily movement becomes strangely active, including rise of blood pressure and dilatation of pupils. A team of Canadian researchers showed that music triggers the release of dopamine in both the dorsal and ventral striatum. These regions are associated with the response to pleasurable stimuli.
More than pleasurable physical and mental stimulations, music can also be a good vehicle to explain concepts to children, including existential and universal questions that sometimes we are not able to fully comprehend and untangle.
It is true that Music, thanks to its melody and symphony, leaves an imprint in our emotional brains in three minutes and a half, and the lyrics go straight to our brain, the one that thinks and builds meanings. Other songs also have an higher impact: each time that we listen to them, memories, associations and emotions come back to us. A right “educational juke box”, or musical education opens a big emotional bridge among generations, unraveling, from Father to Son, that fathers were once children too. Above all, complex concepts – love, death, justice-injustice, peace-war, can be grasped through songs, feeling the emotions of our temporary life on this planet.
Jazz Man (c) Pinterest.com
Some songs that can never be forgotten, and that – across generations- are still alive and full of meanings, can be these ones:
Father and Son– Cat Stevens
Imagine– John Lennon
Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I am yours– Stevie Wonder
We are the World– USA for Africa
Life itself– Bruce Springsteen
I heard it through the grapevine– Marvin GayeI
Sinnerman– Nina Simone
Think– Aretha Franklin
Let it be– The Beatles