Genius Hour Blog #3: Research!

Genius Hour Question: How Can I Use Music to Improve Memory and Organization?

And so my research begins! I'm starting off by gathering information that already exists on this topic, hoping to find methods that have been proven successful to try out on myself and possibly others. Though I created this question with my own memory issues in mind, I think I will include some other subjects as well to see how many different results these methods can produce. I hope, in the end to find a method or methods that can work for the largest amount of people possible. 

First off, I want to know what the academic world thinks about the relationship between music and memory. Can using music to memorize information actually provide better results than the written or spoken word? 

I have heard stories over the years of familiar melodies bringing memories back to people who have lost them. I think everyone has. This theory is not a new one in any way, but it has not very often been put into practice, and so the benefits of it are still largely untapped. A friend of my mothers works in a nursing home and they play music during lunch and there is a very noticeable effect on the behaviors of the residents, people who rarely speak will sometimes sing along with the lyrics, people who struggle to feed themselves will start eating, all habits that are in one way or another connected to the presence of music. I want to take this connection between music and memory a step further and develop or explore an already existing method to help me keep on top of my assignment due dates for the whole year. But how can I take a mind as young as mine, with all of its temptations towards distraction, and train it to accept even more information and retain it?  

I am only in the very early stages on my research but I have come across a few articles that look very promising, here is one: 

 "The Effect of Familiar Melodies on Initial Learning and Long-term Memory for Unconnected Text." by David W. Rainy

I found this article on JStor and it covers the results of an experiment using familiar melodies like "Pop Goes the Weasel" and "Yankee Doodle" to carry information like a list of names and then asking people to try to memorize as much as they can and comparing the results with people who received the same info just spoken verbally. Rainy notes that there is no immediate difference between the two groups  but when they are asked to recall the information a week later, the people who received it to music remembered it better. 

Rainey, David W., and Larsen Janet D. "The Effect of Familiar Melodies on Initial Learning and Long-term Memory for Unconnected Text." Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20.2 (2002): 173-86. Web.