December 25th, 2008
MUSIC AND MEMORY
As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, memorizing facts can be rather boring. This is especially true for kids with Attention Deficit Disorder. So we suggested doing physical movements and exercises while memorizing in a couple of our posts about exercise and ADD.
How else can you help to improve your child’s memory, considering that his ADD is causing his mind to wander about? One way is by playing music in the background while memorizing facts. I don’t mean Yanni or Kenny G. You want to get your kid’s brain working, not make him feel nauseous. However, classical music, which is more "complicated" music, works well.
The idea is that listening to certain types of complex music may "warm-up" neural transmitters inside the brain and thereby improves spatial performance , which is the mental process where the brain attempts to interpret different types of information. This is called the “Mozart Effect”.
So this week I tried this myself with Steven. He was having a lot of trouble with remembering his multiplication tables. I put on some Mozart and we began our multiplication game (the game is explained in this past post about exercise and homeschooling ADD kids). At one point in the middle of the game the music stopped and he said “The music!” I didn’t think he had even noticed. When the multiplication game was over I tested how much he remembered and he got them all right. It is something that we are going to be doing all the time from now on.
Try it yourself! Go to a site like www.lastfm.com or www.pandora.com and find your favorite classical artist and let me know what you think.
My comments on other blogs (and the comments of others that I responded to):