Galina Mindlin - Your Playlist Can Change Your Life: 10 Proven Ways Your Favorite Music Can Revolutionize Your Health, Memory, Organization, Alertness and More

Copyright 2012 by Galina Mindlin, Don DuRousseau, Joseph Cardillo

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mindlin, Galina.

Your playlist can change your life : ten proven ways your favorite music can revolutionize your health, memory, organization, alertness, and more / Galina Mindlin, Don DuRousseau, Joseph Cardillo.

p. cm.

Includes index.

(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Music--Psychological aspects. 2. Music--Physiological aspects. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. DuRousseau, Don. II. Cardillo, Joseph, 1951- III. Title.

ML3838.M647 2012

781.11dc23

2011035363

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedications

For everyone with an open mind

And for my family: husband, Denis; daughter, Alyona;

Mom and Dad; and my friends who are sharing

the passion and excitement with me in many

moments on my life journey.

Galina

For my son, LCpl Gerald DuRousseau, USMC,

our military forces in harms way, and to all our

nations first responders, especially those who

assisted in my research.

Don

For my wife, Elaine, and our daughters, Isabella

and Veronica, whom we loved before they were

born, and to my mother and father,

Josephine and Alfio Cardillo.

Joseph

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music is what life sounds like.

Eric Olson

Imagine your mind uncluttered, happy, and free. For most of us, thats not a reality. But we used to have a mind like that. At birth, a free-flowing, feel-good mind is as natural to all of us as breathing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his seminal book Flow, defines that kind of FLOW as a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity. Research shows that we naturally operate in a flow mind-set up to about the age of five, when it usually begins to wane.

But the good news is that we can regain flow at any age. Imagine having that mind-setfresh and unfettered, fast and cleanin almost an instant, helping you vault into your best performance to meet your goals. Whether you need to bolster your alertness because you are a little too mellow for a task, calm yourself down because you are too much on edge, strengthen your memory, rein in your emotions, increase your organization, boost your immune system, or just amplify your enjoyment of life, flow can help you reach these goals.

One of the best ways to achieve this flow is through music, because music has been with us since the beginning.

Your mind-body connection to music is nothing less than dazzling. In fact, the first music encoded deep within your memory are the earliest vibrations that made youthe rhythms and tempos of your first cells. Imagine this: as your cells began to develop with the comforting rhythms of your mothers heartbeat and the whooshing, low-frequency sounds vibrating through her placenta and your umbilical cord, these first musical scores began ENTRAINING (two or more rhythms synchronizing into one) in your brain and orchestrating the essence of music for your entire being. So from your first sparks of life, your brain was already establishing the relationship for how music affects you today.

But can you remember these early musical memories? Newborns can almost immediately show some memory of sounds they encountered in the womb. Although babies react to only about one-third of all surrounding available sounds within the first six hours of birth, they begin to react more and more as the weeks progress. Before any of us is capable of speaking words, we can recognize changes in notes and rhythmic patterns. Whats more, researchers have demonstrated that if you play a piece of music repeatedly to a child before birth, and then play the same piece within a month after birth, the child is able to recognize it. And we know that soon after birth, infants can instantly respond to their moms soothing voice singing a lullaby, especially if they were exposed to the song during the last three months of pregnancy. These kinds of musical memories can help you get your mind FLOWING for your entire life.

During your first six months of life, you learn to make meaning out of what you hear. Throughout all this development, lyrical and comforting MOTHERESEthe singsong ways in which parents speak to their children before and after birthplays a significant role in instilling feelings of calm, safety, and love. (Motherese sounds the same no matter what language you speak or historical time frame you consider; the effect is the same.) When you imagine a mother cradling her baby in her arms, speaking gently and sweetly, the two are psychologically and physiologically wrapped in a feeling that zooms through time and space, from mother to child, a feeling that has endured for millennia. In a way, it is not surprising that only by their fourteenth week, children can distinguish their own mothers footsteps from anyone elses and discriminate between their mothers voice and a strangers.

These early musical influences stay with us for our entire lives. Its no wonder that you can go to the beach on any given day and see a man or woman lying in the sand, eyes gently closed, listening to the whoosh of waves and the easy hush of wind, smiling like a baby, not really knowing why it all feels so good, just loving it, flowing with it, comfortably and calmly. Its as though nature has planted a computer chip in our emotional brain that triggers deep, primitive pleasure at the slightest echo of the sounds that were there during your making. This is literally the flowing music of your own, personal lullabysounds so powerful that, years later, they can short-circuit negative thoughts in just milliseconds or reroute a day headed for catastrophe into one headed for victory.