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Music and Color for

Your Brain

What's Your Mood?

• How does music affect you physically?

• How does music affect your mood?

• How does color affect your mood?

• Can changing your environment

change your brain?

Why Music?

Listening to music alleviates anxiety and depression,

Enhances mood

Can increase cognitive functioning, such as spatial awareness

Can ease stress and increase relaxation

Can invigorate

Music is associated with immunoglobin A, an antibody linked to immunity, as well as higher counts of cells that fight germs and bacteria.

Listening to music you enjoy

can increase dopamine

levels in the brain, increasing

energy and concentration.

When should you listen?

• Before an important task

- This is when music is most beneficial to concentration

and focus

- Do NOT listen while performing complex tasks,

especially math tasks.

• For relaxation

- Before sleep

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is

to the soul what a water bath is to the body.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Memories triggered by music

cause some of the strongest

emotional responses and can

be very intense.

Sound, Experience and Emotion

•According to researchers, music affects our mood through rhythm and tone.

When we listen to a rhythm, our heart actually begins to synch with it.

A slow heartbeat with a strong diastolic pressure tells our brain that

something sad or depressing is occurring.

Very fast beating is obviously related to excitement.

A dreamy rhythm with occasional upbeats can signify love or joy.

Heart rate and brain waves change with the music.

Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown

Sound, Experience and Emotion

• Tones are equally important as rhythm.

A “major key” music piece signifies cheerful communication to our brain.

A “minor key” pieces closely mirror the sighs and soft keenings of lamentation.

This has a powerful effect on our brain, which directs us to actually feel what’s being communicated to us.

[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger. ~John Chesson

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Making Music Work For You … and Your Mood

So how can you take advantage of the mood-boosting

benefits of music?

Here are some practical tips:

Listen to upbeat music in the morning. Hormones related to that “get up and go” you feel in the morning begin to peak at

around breakfast-time.

Encourage this activity, along with your brain’s response to it, by putting on some

light, easy and cheery music shortly after you awaken each morning.

Decrease your anxiety with soothing music and

meditation. Anxiety and sadness/depression often go hand in hand, feeding on one another to

lower your mood.

Set aside time each day to meditate to soothing music, such as classical music, soft

rock, MP3s of wind chimes, wind or soft tones.

Making Music Work For You

Choose “directed tones.”

Pioneers in the field of music, tones and mood are creating more and more pieces aimed at directing the brain to achieve changes you’d like to feel.

One example of such pieces is the science of binaural beats, or tones played in each ear individually.

These produce rhythms that the brain automatically begins to follow, creating the mood you want.

Your left brain has more difficulty “predicting”, allowing your right brain to take over.

Making Music Work For You Give yourself breaks between listening and not listening to music.

You want your brain to sense a definite distinction between your therapeutic

tones time and downtime.

Don’t overdo it on fast music or hard rock.

The quickened heart beat response will begin to produce a vague message of

anxiety to your brain.

Keep listening to the tunes you love, but save them for when you really want to

get up and dance.

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.

~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

What Music is Best?

Relaxing:

1. Marconi Union - Weightless *

2. Airstream - Electra

3. DJ Shah - Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix)

4. Enya - Watermark

5. Coldplay - Strawberry Swing

6. Barcelona - Please Don't Go

7. All Saints - Pure Shores

8. Adelev - Someone Like You

9. Mozart - Canzonetta Sull'aria

10. Cafe Del Mar - We Can Fly

*Do not listen to this while driving.

What Music is Best?

Concentration:

1. Relax with the Classics. The LIND Institute. Slow Baroque music

2. Velvet Dreams. Daniel Kobialkao.

3. Celtic Fantasy. Kobialka

4. Music for Relaxation. Chapman and Miles.

5. Baroque Music to Empower Learning and Relaxation. The Barzak Institute.

6. Mozart and Baroque Music. The Barzak Institute.

7. Mozart Effect, selected by Don Campbell.

8. An Dun. Calming the Emotions Chinese music

9. Accelerating Learning. Steven Halpern

Color and Mood

Can color affect your mood?

Can color affect your performance?

Can color affect your health?

Findings from research suggest that while color influences human response, the existence of an irrefutable and universal link between color and an range of psychological, biological, and behavioral responses remains an unsupportedhypothesis.

Science and Color

Why is there so little research?

Colors are perceived differently

Age

Health

Moods are perceived differently

Age

Culture

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that's important. -Jim Rohn

Science and Color

Players that wear black jerseys in professional sports are

penalized more often than players wearing white jerseys.

During a study, people performing tasks in a red room

reported more aggressive feelings than people working in

a blue room.

Colors are the smiles of nature. -Leigh Hunt

Color and Performance

Color coding helps the brain to learn.

Connections, a basis of learning, are easier to see.

Background color (paper color) helps retention.

Harvard study, green

is best, but any color helps.

Ambiance

Calm, cool colors in a

room enhance learning.

Culture and Colors

Reaction to color varies by culture.

Black is for mourning in the West,

White is for mourning in the East.

Reaction to color varies by age.

Children see red as uplifting,

Adults see red as aggressive.

Mature adults have more difficulty with distinguishing specific colors

We don't all see the same colors the same way.

Influenced by brain processing, light, intensity, value. (Color realism)

The Accepted Norms

Color and Performance Undergraduates read a passage printed on red or green paper (Experiment 1) or

white paper (Experiment 2)

Then took a test printed on red or green paper (Experiment 1) or white, blue, green,

yellow, or pink paper (Experiment 2).

A small difference was noted on the test phase.

Participants who studied material on green paper outperformed those who studied

material on red paper.

These findings suggest that educators using different colors to distinguish test versions

will not negatively impact students’ performance, but that the color of study materials will

affect the amount retained.

Color in our Language

Out of the blue: unexpected

True blue: to be loyal or faithful

Feeling blue: to feel sad or unhappy

Get the green light: get approval to move ahead or

proceed with a project or task

Green with envy: jealous or envious

See: Green With Envy

Color in our Language Yellowbellied: a cowardly manner

Yellow journalism: newspaper articles thought to be sensationalized in order to sell more papers

Brown out: a partial loss of electrical power

In a brown study: describing someone as being in deep thought

Gray mood: an unhappy mood

Gray area: caught between two differing views

Color in our Language

Caught red-handed: clearly guilty

Red letter day: a memorable, joyful day

Tickled pink: to be happy

Pink slip: notice that employment is ending

Purple prose: an elaborately written poem or paragraph in

literature

Lay it out in lavender: very cool, relaxed, and in control

Color in our Language

White lie: a harmless untruth usually told out of

politeness

White feather: a symbol of cowardliness

Black sheep: a bad character in an otherwise

respectable group

In the Black: economically positive

We appreciate your time and attention. Please let

us know if you have any questions.

Thank you.

©UFS

Work-Life ASSIST

Always available. Always confidential.

1-877-286-0269

www.work-lifeassist.com

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