Music's Influence on the Human Mind

This topic submitted by Brandon Cirillo, Katie Dever, Tony DiGraci ( bmcirillo@gmail.com ) on 2/3/06. [ Human Nature Team: Brandon Cirillo, Katie Dever, Tony DiGraci-Section: Cummins/Wolfe]

Our study seeks to understand the influence that music has on the connection between a person's memory and emotions. This study will rely heavily upon surveying random samples of the population and outside research. We hope to discover that music has a positive effect on memory when compared to silence and that some forms of music will have a greater effect than others. We are also interested in seeing how emotional responses to certain music types affect human memory. We want to hold a test with a large population in which participants would be subject to many different genres of music, as well as silence (for the control) and television noise (as a relevant question of study habits). While the music is playing, a series of random pictures will be shown and the participants will be asked to recall them in the order they remember them. A separate test will be done with the same participants with much the same procedure, but rather than recalling the images, they will be asked to describe their emotional responses. Hopefully through this research we can determine the best way for a student to maximize their study habits.

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