Music and Logic: Did Playing the Violin Help Sherlock Holmes?
However, this influence can’t be ignored and music does help me come to the correct decision and find words to express my ideas.
Wondering how widespread it is, I suddenly thought of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, who plays the violin to calm down and think.
What is it - just an extra touch to his portrait, revealing a character as a sophisticated well-educated person or is there anything else?
So, I started searching for more information. Research shows that playing some musical instrument is beneficial in many ways.
It helps us understand and analyze visual information better, improves our verbal and non-verbal skills and develops higher IQ.
In Japan and the Netherlands, which are among the top academic countries in the world, a great emphasis is placed on music education. In the USA, all the top engineers from Silicon Valley play some musical instruments.
Image credit The ability of music to affect our brain is rather significant.
Some works of classical music, for example, compositions by Mozart, activate our left and right brain. Their simultaneous action maximizes our mental abilities.
There are a lot of examples from history, where the role of music cannot be overestimated.
And one of the traditional musical instruments here is the violin, mentioned above as the favorite musical instrument of the famous detective.
It helped numerous real well-known celebrities.
For instance, while writing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson would play the violin when he was having difficulty finding the right words for some part and it did help him a lot.
This musical instrument also had a major impact on Albert Einstein.
When he was a child, his parents were told that he was “too stupid to learn” and suggested that he should be taken out of school.
They didn’t listen to his teachers and bought him a violin instead.
It changed his life. Einstein became good at the violin and it helped him become one of the most intelligent people of all time.
Later, improvising on the violin enabled him to figure out his equations and problems.
So, today I’m sure that music is not only a pleasant background soundtrack to our life; it can be the key to the additional resources of our brains, which will help us cope with the most difficult tasks.
Now I always keep CD disks with the works of Mozart and Bach handy and I'm ready for a challenge.
And what about Sherlock Holmes? Who knows, maybe if he hadn't played the violin while thinking over the cases, Professor Moriarty would have planned many other terrible crimes...
And here are the links to some researches on the subject:
- Practicing a Musical Instrument in Childhood is Associated with Enhanced Verbal Ability and Nonverbal Reasoning, Marie Forgeard, Ellen Winner , Andrea Norton, Gottfried Schlaug
Published: October 29, 2008
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003566 - The “Mozart Effect” and the Mathematical Connection, Judy M. Taylor, Beverly J. Rowe
Published: Journal of College Reading and Learning, 42(2), Spring 2012
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ972860.pdf
Thank you for reading.
I do appreciate all your comments and upvotes.
Thank you for posting. This bears repeating and may be a new idea to some. If I may, I will resteem it later on. Cheers.
It is a known fact that playing a musical instrument helps with cognitive development. So it makes a lot of sense that the violin would have helped Holmes become and stay mentally sharp!
Very interesting post.
Congrats, Andrew ;D
it is a more expansive subject than even these connections. music was taught as part of the Quadrivium as music is the number in time. the second part of the Quadrivium is geometry, which is the number in space. the last part of the Quadrivium is astronomy, which is the number in space and time. so you can see how Einstein was able to do so much with the concept of space-time. this presents a coherent, comprehensive structure by which we may understand the world around us. to anyone interested i would recommend The Trivium Method and The Quadrivium. these are the basis of the classical education, that have enabled the building of civilization. i would be interested in your thoughts on the A-432 tuning. this is a more natural tuning that corresponds more closely to the natural resonances of matter in the natural world (there is that, matter-energy, Einstein connection again). the common tuning today is A-440. i have seen experiments that show A-432 to be more harmonizing to the hemispheres of the brain, allowing more organized, coherent thinking. there are softwares to convert the A-440 to A-432. i find this very useful. i think that it probably varies from person to person, a little. this is all related to the Schumann resonances and the earth-sun energetic system in which we evolved. there is more than i can get into here. there are many who are resistant to this to the point of anger, i'm not sure why. these are demonstrable physical principles involving matter. i can elucidate further if you are interested. so, any thoughts?
nice!
I’m a violinist. Thank you for this! This is nice.