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| How many elements can you name in order? (Source:
http://fiveless.deviantart.com)
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My children are driving me
crazy. They are listening, over and
over, to a song that lists all the elements of the periodic table to the tune of the Can-Can by Offenbach. Repeatedly.
Unceasingly. Again and
again. They enthusiastically sing along,
trying to commit every word to memory. It’s
all in the cause of good learning, but still, I’m going cross-eyed. Even when the music finally stops, it’s still
going in my head, on endless loop.
On the other hand: my kids
are memorizing the periodic table of the elements! I should, just maybe, quit complaining and be
geekfully grateful for their eager efforts to improve their minds. I also love that they are able to do this
because the information is set to music.
The use of song as a mnemonic
device is well-known and we’ve pretty much all used this technique, starting
with singing the ABC song to learn the alphabet. Many university students make use of songs to
memorize facts; I recommend it to my neuroscience students. I even own a copy of The Biochemists’ Songbook by Harold Baum, which is a whole book of songs designed to make learning the metabolic pathways
easier. All of this suggests that
wrapping information up in music makes it easier to remember.
But is that really true?
And, if so, why?
There are a number of possible reasons
that remembering a song is easier than remembering a list of information. The first is that presenting information as a
song provides a temporal structure. It
turns a jumble of unordered information into a sequence, with one idea leading
to the next in a particular order.
Imposing structure on information is a key way to improve recall. A research study by Wanda Wallace in 1994 showed that text is better remembered when set
to a simple, repetitive melody than when spoken. She discusses the idea of sequential recall,
and describes how it works: when we
learn information always in the same order, one piece of information cues the
next piece in the sequence. Also,
connecting each bit of text to a particular part of the melody means that even
if you forget one part of the text, the music will help cue the next line of
text.
The second idea as to why music
helps us remember information is that the structure of the music provides clues
as to the words. For instance, the shape
and rhythm of the melodic line tell us how many syllables should be present in
the words that go with it. This is
redundant information: both the words
and melody tell us how many syllables should be present, and so it makes it
easier to remember. A study in 2008 by Purnell-Webb and Speelman looked to see
whether the reputed effects of music on memory for text were due to melody or
rhythm, and whether the music needed to be familiar to the listener to be most
effective. They found that learning text
to a familiar tune or rhythm conferred a memory advantage over spoken text, and
concluded that it is the rhythmic aspects of the music that help people
remember the words, by providing temporal structure and redundant cues, as
discussed above.
Some researchers, however, dispute
the effect of music on memory. If we
have to learn both text and music at the same time, this is more information to
learn and should make it harder. There
are indeed some studies showing that spoken text is in fact easier to remember than sung text , especially if the melody is novel and
non-repetitive. Even in the studies
where music does enhance memory, the effect is pretty small. And yet, we've all used music to help us learn facts. Why are the experimental results so
different from our real-life experience? I believe this discrepancy is due to the fact that in the laboratory,
the number of repetitions is controlled:
the subjects in the experiment listened to the spoken information the
same number of times as they listened to the sung information.
The real strength of using music to
remember information is that people love music.
Listening to a lively song about chemistry is infinitely more enjoyable
than listening to a dry recitation of all the elements in the periodic table,
so we’ll listen to it more. In short:
music adds motivation. In an article entitled, "Is Memory for Music Special?", Matthew Schulkind suggests, that “the ‘special’
power of music as a mnemonic device may be that it fosters excessive
rehearsal”. In other words, putting the
information into a song makes it more fun, so we practice it more.
This is certainly the case with the
periodic table song. My children are
unlikely to spend much time repeating a spoken list of chemical elements, but
they beg me to allow them to access YouTube so that they can sing along with
the video. I relent, and while the music
of Offenbach swells around us, they dance around the living room, chorusing: “There’s hydrogen and helium, then lithium,
beryllium, boron, carbon everywhere, nitrogen all through the air…"
I sigh, but smile smugly on the
inside. These kids are going to ace
chemistry when they get to high school.
Thanks, Offenbach and AsapSCIENCE!
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