Note: The following essay was assigned so the students could practice their editing and also consider biases, which is part of their Wikipedia assignment. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:31, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

A time when I learned to like something

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Required assignment of English 102:

When I was a teenager I used to think of classical music as drawl; I had been accustomed to the Rock n' Roll lifestyle. I couldn't stand  the slow melodies, I thought it was just for old people or music majors.

That was until, last year when my family was spending the holidays together at my grandmother's. We got into a fairly heated debate involving political viewpoints. In the midst of this my grandmother decided to put on classical music, Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" [1] to be exact. As the song played on, our arguments started to fade. Until, finally we were all content just sitting in silence. After I got home I thought about how the slow classical music may have been the cause.

 I decided to do some research on the effects of classical music on the brain and overall mood of a person. I found that listening to classical music can increase dopamine[2] levels (the happy hormone).  Dopamine levels also increase when people find information that agrees with their viewpoint. I read this in NY article[3] explaining the psychological impacts on how strongly a person's viewpoint can be ingrained even when told they were wrong or given false information to build off of in clinical studies.

After reading all this, I decided  that I could finally start to enjoy another genre of music with a newfound respect for the classical artists out there.

  1. ^ "Piano Sonata No. 14 (Beethoven)". Wikipedia. 2017-11-09.
  2. ^ "Dopamine". Wikipedia. 2018-01-09.
  3. ^ Kolbert, Elizabeth (2017-02-20). "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2018-01-15.