Essay on Preferences
Many people have hobbies and preferences nowadays. For instance, some people like reading, while others like drawing, but my preference is music. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to describe a preference that has a place in my life, and to research it from a psychological perspective.
Firstly, I want to mention that my love to music has very deep roots because even when I was a little child my parents and I were listening to music for many hours. Nowadays, I like different kinds of music, but in general, I am sure that love to music and the ability to enjoy it evoke imagination, help to develop a good taste and teach people to understand the beautiful.
Exploring my preference, it seems to me that exactly an area of cognitive psychology is best suited for providing psychological insight into my love to music. It is a well-known fact that various researches in this subfield of psychology (which studies the cognitive processes of human consciousness) are usually associated with issues of memory, attention, feelings, views, information, logical thinking, imagination, and ability to make decisions; thus, music as a kind of preference which evokes a big variety of different the above presented components is not an exception. I strongly believe that melodious music created in professional way brings people together spiritually. It even seems to me that this happens on a deep spiritual level, involving such psychological processes as memory, emotions, feelings and imagination, and this fact causes physical changes in the body. That is, the soul and the senses are primary, and the genetic cellular changes are secondary.
Discussing the ways how biological bases of behavior have contributed to my preference, I can say that people listened to music at all times and in all cultures. There were presented long and detailed similarities between human and bird songs many decades ago. To be more specific, it is possible to declare that both kinds of human and bird songs contain a message and fix the internal state, which can be detected even by the members of other species. Meanwhile, the perception of music has several features that are important from the viewpoint of biology: for instance, a lullaby strengthens the relationship between a parent and a child, combined singing or playing music involve people in collective action and strengthens social ties in the group. Thus, music gives me a good opportunity to change the own way of thinking, to turn on the own imagination and to percept the surrounding reality through various musical compositions in other atypical way.
Analyzing how engaging in music affects my state of consciousness, it is good to note that music makes my life bright and full of new emotions. For example, not many years ago I begin to play the piano and this kind of music activity helps me to become more attentive and self-disciplined. According to Soni (2002), musical education and playing the any, even the noise instrument improves intelligence and generally changes the overall well-being in better side. Parncutt, R. & McPherson added that music favors the development of concentration, improves mood and the work of immune system. In such a way, in my opinion, music is not only a great fun, a good pastime, etc., but it is also a social phenomenon. Being engaged in music, any individual receives an excellent opportunity for pleasant conversation, refined pretext for establishing business contacts, ‘strong cement’ which fastens real friendships, as well as more intimate relationships. Generally speaking, exactly music is a great destroyer of all kinds of interpersonal barriers: age, hierarchical, and others, which our complicated life likes to build between people day after day.
Summing up the above presented information about my preference and information gained during the course of psychology, I need to say that learning has had a very positive effect on my love to music. For example, various psychological theories and studies helped me to understand the mechanism of my love to music, its specific features and showed the ways how to make the process of listening to music more interesting and useful. In addition, thorough analysis of the literature demonstrated a beneficial effect of certain musical works on the intellectual activity. Thus, Deutsch (1999) stated that there were identified mechanisms of positive influence of music on learning activities, increasing the motivation of learning, and growth of satisfaction during the studies.
To conclude, I have described my preference with many details, and explained its psychological nature from various perspectives. I strongly believe that every person has a certain potential, which tends to reveal, from the birth, and exactly music could help to open this potential in the most efficient way. In other words, the desire for self-expression inherent in us at the genetic level and is as much a necessity as a desire to satisfy hunger, thirst, or creation of comfortable living conditions. Thus, implementing this desire to self-expression through music people receives an additional opportunity to be truly happy.
