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This article is relevant because it includes more recent studies and data from other websites that are credible. The website does however include an opinion on proving this question. I see myself using this information on trying to decide opinions and giving reasons on proving the question.

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This website is relevant because it was rated green on News Guard. It also has more information and data that is more credible and factual. I see myself using this article for data and getting information (Facts). This website also seems biased, because it is pushing more towards a negative answer, but with more credible sources.

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SOURCE 4
-soothing/relaxing music helps students with anxiety/nerves.
-background music may improve focus
-provides motivation and better mood
-some students say it helps with memorization.
SOURCE 1
-"proven to ease students stress."
-reduce test anxiety
-music with no words/relaxed and slow paced
-"One older study found that listening to music allowed test takers to complete more questions...and get more answers right."
-"Several studies have linked music, memory, and emotions."
-"End your study with classical music."
SOURCE 2:
-music with lyrics hinders reading
-motivational and mood improving.
-listening to music before and after studying helps.
SOURCE 5
-"...internally focused though, empathy, and self awareness."
-certain songs can trigger emotions and or memories, so it is best to listen to music without lyrics.
-therapeutic
SOURCE 6:
-(test with half group talking anxiety meds before  surgery and other half listened to music)
group who listened to music did better/ had less anxiety.

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SOURCE 7:
-listening to sad music can affect the brain negatively, and cause negative emotions to grow larger.
-"Analysis showed that anxiety and neurotic ism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males."
-"This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood," says Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test."

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With that highly detailed Biology exam just around the corner, you have been hitting the books with every spare second you have. During nightly, starlit studying sessions, you continuously trudge past midnight, and the hours multiply. What if there was a more beneficial practice rather than spending hours upon hours of silence studying in your bedroom?

The Theory

You have likely heard before that music helps you study. But, do you know why parents and professors alike are urging you to tune to iTunes? Studies have shown that music produces several positive effects on a human's body and brain. Music activates both the left and right brain at the same time, and the activation of both hemispheres can maximize learning and improve memory. Find out music's effect on your body and brain, and see how to enhance your studying with songs!

Proven to Ease Student Stress

In the middle of a busy semester, students' stress runs high. This is the perfect reason to study your class notes with music playing, - it is proven to help reduce stress!

Music is a way to process emotions and strengthen their resolve while being overwhelmed. People often turn to the music they can relate to as it helps them deal with stress in this way. So, if university life has got you feeling a bit down, dazed or distracted then it might be a good idea to put some music on while you study. Not only will it help you concentrate on your studies, it will also help keep stress at bay and put you in the learning mood.

Reduce Test Anxiety

Anxiety can become a crippling blockade between students and their textbooks. How can students beat it? Let's pretend you were offered a free, soothing massage during each study session for the duration of your college years. You would feel lower levels of anxiety and tension as you reviewed your notes. While this might be a difficult feat for the typical college student to attain, the next best thing is readily available to pupils all over the world. Believe it or not, USA Today reveals, "one study found that music's effect on anxiety levels is similar to the effect of getting a massage" (Christ). It is official; your favorite tunes can reduce anxiety as much as a massage! Anxiety-stricken students should pop in the earbuds before heading to the library. They will feel relaxed, at ease, and ready to conquer chapter after chapter.

If you're like many students suffering from anxiety and stress, try listening to rap music while studying. A study done by Cambridge University showed that hip-hop music provides an uplifting effect on its listeners that can help them accept, manage and deal better with mental health issues. There's more than one genre of rap, so find the one you like if it means giving your brain that extra bit of support it needs.

Improve Your Performance

Music is found to help people perform better in high-pressure situations, such as the bi-annual high-pressure event that is finals week. Studies have shown that music can help students transform from coal to diamonds, shining under pressure. USA Today asks, "Want to sink the game-winning shot when the pressure's on? Listen to some upbeat tunes before the big game. . . basketball players prone to performing poorly under pressure during games were significantly better during high-pressure free-throw shooting if they first listened to catchy, upbeat music and lyrics"(Christ). This relates to anyone combating high-pressure situations, including you and your studious peers! Grab that 80's style boom box and turn the volume up!

It can even cure pain!

So, you arrived at the last Conquistadors basketball game, prepared to perform better after a little music therapy. Excited and energized, you played all of your best moves on the court, until you sprained your ankle landing a slam dunk. Ouch! Now, every time you attempt to study, your mind only focuses on the pounding pain in your ankle! Have you tried studying with music? According to USA Today, music is so powerful to the body that it can actually help ease the pain. Studies show that music can meaningfully reduce the perceived intensity of pain, especially in geriatric care, intensive care, or palliative medicine.

Your ankle pain and your midterm stand no chance against your favorite album and focused mind! Similar to how a lullaby would calm you, listening to music can also help you relax as by lowering your blood pressure, easing muscle tension and increasing your attention span.

It will help you focus more

Rather than distracting college students, a Stanford study found that "music moves [the] brain to pay attention." Researchers utilized musical compositions from the 1800s in their study and found that "music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory" (Baker). They believe that music choice was influential in brain processing, revealing, "The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information" (Baker). Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven can help students categorize information, which is an influential asset to studying.

Proven to improve brain functions

Musical activity serves as a cognitive exercise for the brain which trains it for more challenges in the future. Therefore, people who have musical training early on, specifically before age seven, have healthier brains and are less likely to suffer from debilitating diseases like Alzheimer's or Dementia. But you don't have to wait for a certain age before benefitting from music. Regardless of whether you're a freshman or senior, you can start exercising your brain now, simply by having your favorite device and earphones handy for any study session.

Music, Memory, Emotions

Several studies in recent years have linked music, memory, and emotion. To back this claim, Petr Janata has conducted two studies to prove that music, memory, and emotion are linked. His initial study found that "music serves as a potent trigger for retrieving memories." During his second study, Janata took Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of students' brains as he played popular songs from their childhood and teenage years. "After each excerpt, the student responded to questions about the tune, including whether it was familiar or not, how enjoyable it was, and whether it was associated with any particular incident, episode or memory" (UC Davis). This study reveals that music, memory, and emotions and strongly linked. This evidence supports the theory that studying while listening to music is a very beneficial practice.

Ever wondered why it's easier to memorize the lyrics to a song than the periodic table of elements? That's because your brain looks for patterns to better understand, recall, and process information. It's the same reason why music producers always put a hook in their songs since what is more commonly known as the earworm or catchy bit.

"Earworm" was coined in 1979 by psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert. It happens when a part of the song gets stuck in your head for an extended period of time and you can't get it out. It just so happens, this is also one way of improving your brain's memory, which is why some language courses are set to a musical pattern of ear-catching melodies. Some even suggest that the benefits don't necessarily depend on the kind of music you listen to, but rather how effectively your brain latches on to the pattern of the song.

End Your Study Session with Classical Music

We now understand that music and memory are strongly linked in the brain, and that music can be beneficial to study. All that studying, however, has made you exhausted! You close the textbooks and lay beneath your blankets, but your mind is still buzzing from all of the information you've acquired. Can't sleep? Well, music can even help you close out the night after studying. "Listening to classical music has been shown to effectively treat insomnia in college students, making it a safe, cheap alternative to sleep-inducing meds" (Christ).

We Want You To Succeed!

Florida National University (FNU) is dedicated to helping our students succeed. While you continue to excel at FNU, please take advantage of our helpful resources. As the semester comes to a close, gain tips from our blog article, " 10 Ways to Prepare for Your Final Exam," and don't forget your headphones!

If you are not currently enrolled at FNU, browse our programs of study and apply now!

Works Cited

Baker, Mitzi. "Music Moves Brain to Pay Attention." Stanford School of Medicine. Stanford School of Medicine, 01 Aug. 2007. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

Christ, Scott. "20 Surprising, Science-backed Health Benefits of Music." USA Today. Gannett, 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

"Stress." University of Maryland Medical Center. University of Maryland Medical Center, n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

"Study Finds Brain Hub That Links Music, Memory and Emotion :: UC Davis News & Information." UC Davis News & Information. UC Davis, 23 Feb. 2009. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

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The Benefits of Studying with Music - Florida National University

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Does Music Help You Study? With that highly detailed Biology exam just around the corner, you have been hitting the books with every spare second you have. During nightly, starlit studying sessions, you continuously trudge past midnight, and the hours multiply. What if there was a more beneficial practice rather than spending hours upon hours...

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers, as we all seek to answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school? This time, we consider growth mindset.
Many students do their homework and revision while listening to music. Many of them will swear that listening to their favourite songs makes them study better. But does music help or hinder learning? And does it matter what type of music you listen to while revising?

Researchers from the applied psychology department of Cardiff Metropolitan University led a study to answer this question. The authors, Nick Perham and Harriet Currie, assigned students into one of four groups: the first revised in silence, the second revised while listening to music with lyrics they liked (which included songs from One Direction and Katy Perry), the third group revised to music with lyrics they did not like (which comprised of very heavy metal bands), and the fourth group revised listening to music without lyrics.

The participants then took a test on the passages they had been revising, rating how distracting their environment had been, as well as writing down their predictions for how well they thought they had done.

What are the main findings?

1. Students who revised in quiet environments performed more than 60% better in an exam than their peers who revised while listening to music that had lyrics.

2. Students who revised while listening to music without lyrics did better than those who had revised to music with lyrics.

3. It made no difference if students revised listening to songs they liked or disliked. Both led to a reduction in their test performance.

4. Students who revised in silence rated their environment as less distracting and accurately predicted that this would lead to better performances in subsequent tests.

Related research

There are some benefits to listening to music while performing certain tasks. It can be quite motivating and it can improve mood (listening to your favourite song tends to make people smile, for example). But it does not help people learn new or complex material.

The misconception that music does help us learn stems from a series of studies linked to the " Mozart effect ", which found that people performed better on a series of cognitive tasks after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart. Participants in these studies appeared to be getting smarter and performing better in tests.

However, further research has since revealed this is not the case. While listening to music before a task can make someone feel better, listening to it while trying to learn something new tends not to help. This is because music - especially tunes with lyrics - can take up processing space. This conflicts with the material you are trying to learn, effectively creating a bottleneck in your memory, as there is less space to process what you are revising.

What does this mean for the classroom?

It is important that students are made aware of the pitfalls of listening to music when revising. Perham and Currie's study found that students rated the quiet environment as less distracting and better for them, yet many students continue to listen to music during their homework. Why? Perhaps they're doing so out of habit, or they confuse what improves their mood with what leads to good revision, or it alleviates boredom. Perhaps it's simply because everyone else is doing it.

Students need to know how to revise well. There may well be a time and place to listen to music during the course of their revision, but not when they are learning new and complex material. After all, silence is golden.

Bradley Busch is a registered psychologist, director at InnerDrive and author of Release Your Inner Drive. Follow @Inner_Drive on Twitter, and get advice on improving memory and a visual summary of this research on his website
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice.

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A new study has found that when we're young, we can listen to music and concentrate on remembering information, but as we get older, the music acts as more of a distraction than anything else.

The link between music at our workplace and cognitive function hasn't really been studied much in the past, which is strange when you think about it, because it's such a common component of many office environments. Whether it's the radio humming ineffectually in the corner, or a series of tunes being carefully curated by the resident 'music expert,' most of us are pretty used to having it around as we work.

So researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US decided to investigate if environmental music is having an effect on how we work. They gathered a group of young, university-aged volunteers, and older adults, and asked them to perform a series of memory tests while sitting in silence, or listening to music.

The exercise tested their associative memory skills, and involved being shown a series of faces and names, and being asked whether the face looked like they belonged to an assigned name. As in, 'Yeah, he looks like a Don.' Having done this once, the faces and names would be run though again a few minutes later, and the participants would have to remember if the combinations they were now being shown were the same as they were before.

Sometimes the test was performed in silence, and other times, while music was playing in the background. The music would range from something as innocuous as musical rain to what the researchers described as 'non-lyrical rock music', such as lesser-known songs from Eric Clapton, Jefferson Airplane, and Rush. (Or, to the university-aged volunteers, 'Who?'.) While performing the memory test, the volunteers had to rate how distracting they found each type of music to be.

The researchers found that, even though they complained about the music being more distracting than the silence, the university-aged participants had no problems performing the memory tests. There was no discernible difference in their results between the two scenarios. But when it came to the old adults, they ended up remembering 10 percent fewer names when performing the task to music, or the musical rain.

"Despite the fact that all participants rated music as more distracting to their performance than silence, only older adults' associative memory performance was impaired by music," The team reports in the journal The Gerontologist. "These results are most consistent with the theory that older adults' failure to inhibit processing of distracting task-irrelevant information, in this case background music, contributes to their memory impairments."

Two factors could be at play here - the first is as we grow older, we get progressively worse at focussing our attention on one thing while tuning out distractions. It's linked to a theory known as the ' cocktail party effect ', which gets its name from the ability to focus on one conversation while navigating a sea of concurrent conversations. Research has found that the ability to filter out background stimuli actually peaks in young adulthood, and gets worse with age.

The second factor is that research has also shown that as we age, our associative memory declines too, so it's even harder for older adults to perform the task, especially when their ability to drown out the music is also sub-par.

The researchers say research like this is important for those who run offices and senior living centres to keep in mind. "They should be mindful of their surroundings. Maybe employees should turn off music during learning activities or hold them in a quiet room," one of the team, psychologist Audrey Duarte, said in a press release. "Similarly, older adults who struggle to concentrate while meeting with co-workers at a coffee shop, for example, should schedule meetings in quieter locations. When people get lost while driving, it's probably best to turn off the radio."

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Listening to Music at Work Could Be Messing With Your Brain Function

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A new study has found that when we're young, we can listen to music and concentrate on remembering information, but as we get older, the music acts as more of a distraction than anything else.

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Benefits of Studying with Music

More and more, students are bringing headphones with them to libraries and study halls. But does it actually help to listen to music when studying? While the so-called 'Mozart effect', a term coined from a study that suggested listening to music could actually enhance intelligence, has been widely refuted, there are still many benefits of listening to music while studying:

Music that is soothing and relaxing can help students to beat stress or anxiety while studying.

Background music may improve focus on a task by providing motivation and improving mood. During long study sessions, music can aid endurance.

In some cases, students have found that music helps them with memorization, likely by creating a positive mood, which indirectly boosts memory formation.

Drawbacks of Listening to Music while Studying

And still, despite these benefits, studies have shown that music is often times more distracting than it is helpful.

Students who listen to music with lyrics while completing reading or writing tasks tend to be less efficient and come away having absorbed less information.

Loud or agitated music can have adverse effects on reading comprehension and on mood, making focus more difficult.

Students who use music to help them memorize sometimes need to listen to music while taking the test in order to reap the benefits of this study method. In the silent test-taking environment, these students may find it more difficult to recall the information.

Ultimately, the effects of music on study habits are dependent on the student and their style of learning. If easily distracted, students should most likely avoid music so they can keep their focus on their work. Conversely, students who function better as multi-taskers may find that music helps them to better concentrate.

Building Better Study Habits

If you're wondering how to improve your memory and study skills, Study.com offers course materials on cognitive perspectives and cognition that include training on improving short- and long-term memory, retrieving memories and forming better study habits.

These resources feature fast and convenient video lessons that can be viewed in about five minutes, plus lesson quizzes to check your comprehension of the material. You'll also find a jump feature that lets you return to key points in each video or skip through info you already know about.

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is it good to listen to music while studying? | study.com

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Is it Good to Listen to Music While Studying? | Study.com

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More and more, students are bringing headphones with them to libraries and study halls. But does it actually help to listen to music when studying?

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It doesn't matter if it's Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people's favorites do in theirs.

That's one of the things Jonathan Burdette, M.D., has found in researching music's effects on the brain.

"Music is primal. It affects all of us, but in very personal, unique ways," said Burdette, a neuroradiologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "Your interaction with music is different than mine, but it's still powerful.

"Your brain has a reaction when you like or don't like something, including music. We've been able to take some baby steps into seeing that, and 'dislike' looks different than 'like' and much different than 'favorite.'"

To study how music preferences might affect functional brain connectivity -- the interactions among separate areas of the brain -- Burdette and his fellow investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Scans were made of 21 people while they listened to music they said they most liked and disliked from among five genres (classical, country, rap, rock and Chinese opera) and to a song or piece of music they had previously named as their personal favorite.

Those fMRI scans showed a consistent pattern: The listeners' preferences, not the type of music they were listening to, had the greatest impact on brain connectivity -- especially on a brain circuit known to be involved in internally focused thought, empathy and self-awareness. This circuit, called the default mode network, was poorly connected when the participants were listening to the music they disliked, better connected when listening to the music they liked and the most connected when listening to their favorites.

The researchers also found that listening to favorite songs altered the connectivity between auditory brain areas and a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation.

"Given that music preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena and that music can vary in acoustic complexity and the presence or absence of lyrics, the consistency of our results was unexpected," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (Aug. 28, 2014). "These findings may explain why comparable emotional and mental states can be experienced by people listening to music that differs as widely as Beethoven and Eminem."

Not surprising to Burdette was the extent of the connectivity seen in the participants' brains when they were listening to their favorite tunes.

"There are probably some features in music that make you feel a certain way, but it's your experience with it that is even more important," said Burdette, who also is professor of radiology and vice chairman of research at Wake Forest School of Medicine. "Your associations with certain music involve many different parts of the brain, and they're very strong.

"In some cases, you might not even like the particular song, but you like the memories or feelings that you associate with it."

In other research projects, Burdette and colleagues at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro have found that trained music conductors are likely to be better at combining and using auditory and visual clues than people without musical training; that activity in brain areas associated with vision decreases during tasks that involve listening; and that different levels of complexity in music can have different effects on functional brain connectivity.

"I find this type of work fascinating, because I think music is so important," Burdette said. "If science can help get more people to recognize what music does to and for us, great."

Music is just a small part of Burdette's research activities -- his most recently published study, for example, showed that brain volume could be an accurate predictor of success in weight-loss attempts by the elderly -- but it has long been a big of part his life.

Burdette grew up playing viola, piano and guitar. He has been singing since childhood and continues to do so, including in the chorus in productions staged by the Piedmont Opera, of which he has been a board member for more than 10 years. He's also done some conducting. His wife, Shona Simpson, plays piano. Their three teenage daughters -- Fiona, Ellie and Jessie -- perform professionally as the Dan River Girls. His brother, Kevin, is a singer who has appeared as a soloist with the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic and other top-tier opera companies and symphony orchestras.

"Music is my avocation," the physician in the family said. "Radiology is my vocation."

Burdette additionally has deep interest, if not direct involvement, in music's clinical applications.

"Music isn't going to cure anything, but it definitely can play a therapeutic role," he said.

In countries such as Germany, Burdette noted, music therapy is commonly an integral part of the rehabilitation process for people who have had strokes, brain surgery or traumatic brain injuries.

"If you're trying to restore neuroplasticity in the brain, to re-establish some of the connections that were there before the injury, music can be a big help, and I'd like to see it used more widely in this country," he said.

Burdette also is a proponent of programs that help people with Alzheimer's, dementia and other cognitive and physical problems re-connect with the world through music. One such program is Music & Memory, which employs iPods with customized playlists featuring songs popular when the participating individual was under 30 years old.

"You can actually see the power of music," Burdette said. "People who were just sitting there, not engaged in anything, light up when they start hearing music from when they were 25.

"It's fantastic. What else can do that? I can't think of anything other than music."

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music; perception; creativity; brain-computer interfaces; intelligence; brain injury; k-12 education; neuroscience

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Music has powerful (and visible) effects on the brain

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It doesn't matter if it's Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people's favorites do in theirs. That's one of the things Jonathan Burdette, M.D., has found in researching music's effects on the brain.

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Exactly what chemical processes occur when we put our headphones? Scientists have come across some clues.

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Brain imaging reveals how neural responses to different types of music really affect the emotion regulation of persons. The study proves that especially men who process negative feelings with music react negatively to aggressive and sad music.

Emotion regulation is an essential component to mental health. Poor emotion regulation is associated with psychiatric mood disorders such as depression. Clinical music therapists know the power music can have over emotions, and are able to use music to help their clients to better mood states and even to help relieve symptoms of psychiatric mood disorders like depression. But many people also listen to music on their own as a means of emotion regulation, and not much is known about how this kind of music listening affects mental health.

Researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä, Aalto University in Finland and Aarhus University in Denmark decided to investigate the relationship between mental health, music listening habits and neural responses to music emotions by looking at a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging data. The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

"Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening," explains Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study.

Participants were assessed on several markers of mental health including depression, anxiety and neuroticism, and reported the ways they most often listened to music to regulate their emotions. Analysis showed that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males. "This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood," says Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test.

To investigate the brain's unconscious emotion regulation processes, the researchers recorded the participants' neural activity as they listened to clips of happy, sad and fearful-sounding music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at the AMI Center of Aalto University. Analysis showed that males who tended to listen to music to express negative feelings had less activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In females who tended to listen to music to distract from negative feelings, however, there was increased activity in the mPFC. "The mPFC is active during emotion regulation," according to prof. Elvira Brattico, the senior author of the study. "These results show a link between music listening styles and mPFC activation, which could mean that certain listening styles have long-term effects on the brain."

"We hope our research encourages music therapists to talk with their clients about their music use outside the session," concludes Emily Carlson, "and encourages everyone to think about the how the different ways they use music might help or harm their own well-being."

The study was supported by the Academy of Finland, and Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation.

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How music listening habits affect mental health

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Brain imaging reveals how neural responses to different types of music really affect the emotion regulation of persons. The study proves that especially men who process negative feelings with music react negatively to aggressive and sad music. Emotion regulation is an essential component to mental health.

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These counterclaims help prove the point of music being harmful when lyrics are involved, but beneficial when calming, no lyric music is registered.

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therapeutic: "... classical music has been found to cause comfort and relaxation..."

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Being a pharmacist, you may think I would always suggest a bottle of something for what ails you. However, first and foremost, I believe in the "do no harm" motto when it comes to healthcare. To me, that means to first try the least invasive route to feeling your best, like a stress-preventing measure, change of diet, or exercise program, before popping a pill. Lifestyle changes can help prevent adverse effects and interactions associated with some drugs, herbs, and supplements. It may be a cost-effective and comparatively safe addition to your health and wellness regimen, and "do no harm" to your pocketbook as well.

For most people, music is already an important part of daily life. Some rely on music to get them through the morning commute, while others turn up a favorite playlist to stay pumped during a workout. Many even have the stereo on when they're cooking, taking a shower, or folding the laundry.

Music is often linked to mood. A certain song can make us feel happy, sad, energetic, or relaxed. Because music can have such an impact on mindset and well-being, it should come as no surprise that music therapy has been studied for use in managing numerous conditions.

All forms of music may have therapeutic effects, although music from one's own culture may be most effective. In Chinese medical theory, the five internal organ and meridian systems are believed to have corresponding musical tones, which are used to encourage healing.

Types of music differ in the types of neurological stimulation they evoke. For example, classical music has been found to cause comfort and relaxation while rock music may lead to discomfort. Music may achieve its therapeutic effects in part by elevating the pain threshold.

Music may be used with guided imagery to produce altered states of consciousness that help uncover hidden emotional responses and stimulate creative insights. Music may also be used in the classroom to aid children in the development of reading and language skills. Receptive methods involve listening to and responding to live or recorded music. Discussion of their responses is believed to help people express themselves in socially accepted ways and to examine personal issues.

There is strong scientific evidence supporting the use of music therapy for mood enhancement and anxiety/stress relief. Here are five conditions for which music therapy has been studied:
Autism
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by stuggles with communication and social interaction, as well as unusual, repetitive behaviors. Some professionals use the broader term, pervasive development disorder (PDD), to refer to the condition. Four other disorders qualify as PDDs - Asperger's syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and Rett syndrome.

People who have autism spectrum disorders often show a heightened interest and response to music. This may aid in the teaching of verbal and nonverbal communication skills and in establishing normal developmental processes.
Dementia
Dementia can be caused by changes in the brain such as those associated with disease or trauma. The changes may occur gradually or quickly. Cognitive functions that may be affected by dementia include decision making, judgment, memory, spatial orientation, thinking, reasoning, and verbal communication. Dementia may also result in behavioral and personality changes, depending on the area(s) of the brain affected.

In older adults with Alzheimer's, dementia, and other mental disorders, music therapy has been found to reduce aggressive or agitated behavior, reduce symptoms of dementia, improve mood, and improve cooperation with daily tasks, such as bathing. Music therapy may also decrease the risk of heart or brain diseases in elderly dementia patients.
Depression
Depression is a mood disorder which affects the way a person eats and sleeps, the way one feels about oneself, and the way one thinks about life situations. Unlike normal emotional experiences of sadness, loss, or passing mood states, depressive disorders are persistent and can significantly interfere with an individual's thoughts, behavior, mood, activity, and physical health. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), depressive disorders affect approximately 18.8 million American adults in a given year, or about 9.5% of the U.S. population age 18 and older.

There is evidence that music therapy may increase responsiveness to antidepressant medications. In elderly adults with depression, a home-based program of music therapy may have long-lasting effects. In depressed adult women, music therapy may lead to reductions in heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and depressed mood. Music therapy may also be beneficial in depression following total knee replacement surgery or in patients undergoing hemodialysis.
Sleep quality
Insomnia s a common health problem that can cause excessive daytime sleepiness and lack of energy. Long-term insomnia can cause an individual to feel tired, depressed or irritable, have trouble paying attention, learning, and remembering, and not be able to perform fully on the job or at school. Severe insomnia can result in neurochemical (brain chemical) changes that may cause problems such as depression and anxiety, further complicating the insomnia.

In older adults, music may result in significantly better sleep quality as well as longer sleep duration, greater sleep efficiency, shorter time needed to fall asleep, less sleep disturbance, and less daytime dysfunction. There is also evidence of benefit in elementary-age children or stable preterm infants. Music therapy may also be as effective as chloral hydrate in inducing sleep or sedation in children undergoing EEG testing.
Cautions
Just as certain music can help induce relaxation and peaceful states, other music may cause agitation. There is evidence that music that reflects the listener's personal preference is more likely to have desired effects. It is possible that music through headphones during medical procedures could interfere with the patient's cooperation with the procedures. Also, listening to music at high volumes may damage the ears and lead to hearing loss.

Music should not be used as the sole treatment for potentially dangerous medical or psychiatric conditions. Use is not recommended in those who do not like music therapy as this may result in agitation or stress.

As always, please consult a doctor or pharmacist before trying any new complementary or alternative therapies. Talking to a medical professional may help you choose the most effective treatment to suit your needs.

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Is music a part of your daily life? Discover some of the ways in which music may help keep stress levels down, improve sleep, and more.

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Topic: pick movie or tv show and analyze it.; WALL-E
STATEMENT: The plot of WALL-E could become a reality.

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- in the movie, mankind has adapted to a lazy way of life, with moving chairs so they dont have to get up, and eating whatever they want no matter what. WALL-E was living on a "damaged" planet that is piled in garbage everywhere with no human life on it any longer. If the world isnt careful with waste and plastics and laziness, this movie could become a distant reality.

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source 1
"the film on its own arguably showcased our planet’s growing problems with pollution and waste."

-"offered a darker look at Earth's possible future — one where humans have ruined the planet's environment with trash — and are forced to live in space, captive to screens, self-driving chairs and robot servants.

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Wall-E arrives at the world premiere of Disney-Pixar's film Wall-E held at the Greek Theater on June 21, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. - Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Ten years ago this summer, we all became familiar with the little trash compacter that could - WALL-E - and his slightly scary, Earth-scanning, but eventual companion Eve.

Disney's "WALL-E," which took home the Academy Award for Best Animated Picture in 2009, offered a darker look at Earth's possible future - one where humans have ruined the planet's environment with trash - and are forced to live in space, captive to screens, self-driving chairs and robot servants.

As a part of our summer entertainment series, we're pondering the critiques and lessons of "WALL-E" with Hugo award-winning, science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, most notable for his Mars trilogy, a series of books all about the terraforming and subsequent settlement of the planet Mars.

Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood sat down with Robinson to discuss the real-life implications of issues brought up in the film, and how some of the critiques it made about society 10 years ago are still relevant now.

Pixar

WALL-E depicts an Earth in squalor, completely covered in trash left behind by its former human inhabitants.

Director Andrew Stanton may have the movie's environmentalist message at the time, but the film on its own arguably showcased our planet's growing problems with pollution and waste .

"There is a worldwide awareness of climate change and of environmental collapse, and that was also true in 2008," Robinson said.

But despite the degraded conditions WALL-E found himself in, the movie still showed viewers there was potential for reform.

"There's still one little sprig of a plant that WALL-E finds and realizes is different, as does Eve. So there's the possibility of regeneration and of restoration that where there's life, there's hope," Robinson noted.

Robinson points to the creation of the Paris Agreement - a worldwide pact to reduce carbon emissions - as evidence that society has pushed for change on this issue.

Pixar

The concept of convenience very much takes the front seat throughout the latter half of "WALL-E" when it is revealed that humanity is still alive and kicking, though restricted to self-driving chairs.

As Robinson explains, humans in the film "are essentially like infants."

"They can't even move. They have to be fed. They're being fed too much," Robinson said. "They've got a ton of baby fat, and so adulthood has been taken away."

That struck a nerve when Robinson watched the film for the first time.

"It was middle America on a summer vacation ... in a theater where you got to eat pizza while you watch the movie ... and we were sitting back in recliners," he said. "It's one of the very few satires that I think pokes a needle right into the heart of our lifestyle."

Pixar

The film also arguably commented on the menial work that employees have to deal with.

"WALL-E looks like Sisyphus. He's a worker bee," Robinson said. "He has a stupid job to package trash into giant skyscraper like columns. It's pointless in a way, and he's just beavering away at it."

Authors like David Graeber (writer of the book " Bullshit Jobs: A Theory ") have started to point how many of our jobs are meaningless. In the U.K., nearly 40 percent of workers said they were quite sure that their jobs made no significant contribution to the world at all.

However, like many of the other themes in the film, "WALL-E" shows how the characters can upend the circumstances they've been placed in.

"[WALL-E] begins to make all kinds of mature adult decisions. He falls in love, does radical things, joins a revolution and overthrows the social order that already exists," Robinson said.

Pixar

Click the above audio player to hear the full interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

"I think the best compliment I can give is not to say how much your programs have taught me (a ton), but how much Marketplace has motivated me to go out and teach myself." - Michael in Arlington, VA

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Ten years later, what we learned from WALL-E

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ten years ago this summer, we all became familiar with the little trash compacter that could - WALL-E - and his slightly scary, Earth-scanning, but eventual companion Eve.

# data[].attributes.body
-film portrays the earths real problem with pollution and waste.
-earth in movie is covered in trash, left by mankind. WALL-E is left to take care of it.
-film shows that there is still hope for the world to change, he finds a spring plant (very important to the story due to no more actual plant life), in hopes to plant it and save the human race.

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-this concept that the film portrays is something that mainly America has been struggling with. People are sitting in moving chairs, screen right in their face, eating and drinking whatever they want, whenever they want.
- source 2
"Overconsumption is a situation where resource use has outpaced the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. A prolonged pattern of overconsumption leads to environmental degradation and the eventual loss of resource bases."

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If you really want to understand a country, a society, or even a civilization, don't turn to its national museums or government archives. Head to the tip.

According to Annie Leonard - former Greenpeace activist, unwavering optimist and waste obsessive - the tip is akin to society's secret journal. "Stuff" became a fascination for Leonard in her teens, choosing field trips to landfills while at university when she began to question how we came to build an economy based purely on resources.

That was 20 years ago, and a lot has changed. Waste and recycling are now burning policy issues. Forty countries, hundreds of factories and still more landfills later , Leonard worries we have not grasped the fundamental problem with our materials economy. "It is a linear system and we live on a finite planet. You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely. Too often the environment is seen as one small piece of the economy. But it's not just one little thing, it's what every single thing in our life depends upon."

In 2007, Leonard tried a novel medium - a YouTube video - to convey the message. The Story of Stuff was a frank and cleverly animated short film telling the story of the American love affair with stuff and how it is quite literally trashing the planet. Three years on and it's a viral online phenomenon; seen by 10 million people in homes and classrooms all over the world. Now she has followed up the video with a book of the same name.

Leonard has surprised many, though, by not actually being against stuff. She isn't even anti-consumption. In fact, she feels lots of people should be consuming more. Just not most of us in the western world who often over-consume.

Consumption can be good, she says. "I don't want to be callous to the people who really do need more stuff".

But consumerism is always bad, adding little to our wellbeing as well as being disastrous for the planet. "[It's] a particular strand of overconsumption, where we purchase things, not to fulfil our basic needs, but to fill some voids about our lives and make social statements about ourselves," she explains.

"It turns out our stuff isn't making us any happier," she argues. Our obsessive relationship with material things is actually jeopardising our relationships, "Which are proven over and over to be the biggest determining factor in our happiness [once our basic needs are met]."

Leonard calls upon wider research to argue the sociological and psychological consequences of our all-consuming epidemic, including that of Tim Kasser and Robert Putman. Kasser identified a connection between an excessively materialistic outlook and increased levels of anxiety and depression, while Putman argues we're paying the ultimate price for our consumeristic tendencies with the loss of friendships, neighbourly support and robust communities. Together they suggest we are witnessing nothing short of the collapse of social fabric across society.

Part of the problem, according to Leonard, is our confused sense of self. We've allowed our citizen self to be dwarfed by a relatively new reflex action - consume, consume, consume. "Our consumer self is so overdeveloped that we spend most of our time there. You see it walking around - we usually interact with others from our consumer self and are most spoken to as our consumer self. The problem is that we are so comfortable there that when we're faced with really big problems [like climate change], we think about what to do as individuals and consumers: 'I should buy this instead of this.'

"If you're going to vote with your dollar that's fine," Leonard says. "But you need to remember that Exxon has a lot more dollars than you. We need to vote with our votes; re-engage with the political process and change the balance of power so that those who are looking out for the wellbeing of the planet dominate, instead of those who are just looking our for the bottom line."

Like George Monbiot, Leonard doesn't think so-called ethical consumption, or greensumption is going to get us out of the problem either. "The real solution is not perfecting your ability to choose the best option, it's getting that product off the shelf," she says. "It's increasingly looking like buying green delays people engaging with the political process."

Leonard's film has its critics. Fox News branded it "full of misleading numbers". And the free market and climate sceptic think tank The Competitive Enterprise Institute, called the project "community college Marxism in a ponytail." But many have found it hard to argue Leonard doesn't live up to her values. At her home in California she and another five families have chosen community over stuff, tearing down the fences between their homes. "Its not a big deal", she says. "We don't have matching clothes and its not like a commune of anything. We are all just regular families in these six houses [who] share things. And we just have so much fun."

The Story of Stuff is about America, but how is the UK faring? Leonard does note some positive differences: the NHS, our liberal political discourse - allowing us to utter the words capitalism and unsustainable in the same large breath, and she likes the fact that washing lines are not a threatened species. One thing that does bug Leonard about this country, though, is our pyromania. Specifically, she's worried about our leaders' love affair with waste incinerators. "It's just so depressing. Incinerators are such a regressive way of dealing with waste materials. We need to promote zero waste as an alternative."

Zero waste is a term that gets thrown around a lot, most recently this week by environment secretary Caroline Spelman. For Leonard, a complete overhaul in our approach involves a real cradle-to-cradle revolution; marrying intelligent design upstream and consumer incentivised recycling and composting downstream.

This may well be one of the answers, and the book provides a few more. But Leonard doesn't pretend to have them all, and she's reluctant to commit to a new economic paradigm, either, because "we haven't invented it yet."

She is sure of one thing though: "Change is inevitable. You can't keep using one and a half planet's worth of resources indefinitely."

Many have argued against the minor details of the book, but few have questioned the fundamental premise that our current use of resources is unsustainable. Even fewer have doubted her optimism. "Environmentalists need to figure out a way of talking about this stuff in a more engaging and inviting way, and that is what I hope I'm doing with this book."

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Overconsumption is costing us the earth and human happiness

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Story of Stuff creator Annie Leonard's new book highlights the high price of the western world's obession with all things material

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- in the film, WALL-E has the job of packaging trash into cubes for the rest of his life. The writer wanted to portray this as a useless, naive job that he is just bearing at.
-most jobs in the US are portrayed as "useless" and have no contribution to the world at all.
-SOURCE 1
"nearly 40 percent of workers said they were quite sure that their jobs made no significant contribution to the world at all."
- "Millennial's want purpose over paycheck."

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-like every disney movie, there is a happy ending. WALL-E finds the spring and plants it and the world goes back to a normal, healthy lifestyle.
-The producer is showing that people can upend the circumstances they’ve been placed in."

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-over fishing
-deforestation
water pollution
-population growth
-resource depletion
-excess waste (plastic)

PLASTIC WASTE SOURCE 3
-" a staggering 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin." this is of the 9.2 billion roughly of plastic stuff we have.
-scientists say we as a human race have become dependent on plastic waste.
-"It’s unclear how long it will take for that plastic to completely biodegrade into its constituent molecules. Estimates range from 450 years to never."
-" ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it."
-"The growth of plastic production has far outstripped the ability of waste management to keep up"

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This story is part of Planet or Plastic?-our multiyear effort to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge.

Read this story and more in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.

If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America-and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks-their plastic trash would likely still be around, four centuries later.

If the Pilgrims had been like many people today and simply tossed their empty bottles and wrappers over the side, Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world's oceans today, sponging up toxins to add to the ones already in them, waiting to be eaten by some hapless fish or oyster, and ultimately perhaps by one of us.

We should give thanks that the Pilgrims didn't have plastic, I thought recently as I rode a train to Plymouth along England's south coast. I was on my way to see a man who would help me make sense of the whole mess we've made with plastic, especially in the ocean.

Because plastic wasn't invented until the late 19th century, and production really only took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a staggering 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin-a figure that stunned the scientists who crunched the numbers in 2017.

No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, Earth's last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone's attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons each year just from coastal regions. Most of it isn't thrown off ships, she and her colleagues say, but is dumped carelessly on land or in rivers, mostly in Asia. It's then blown or washed into the sea. Imagine five plastic grocery bags stuffed with plastic trash, Jambeck says, sitting on every foot of coastline around the world-that would correspond to about 8.8 million tons, her middle-of-the-road estimate of what the ocean gets from us annually. It's unclear how long it will take for that plastic to completely biodegrade into its constituent molecules. Estimates range from 450 years to never.

Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly-strangled by abandoned fishing nets or discarded six-pack rings. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplastics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across. On Hawaii's Big Island, on a beach that seemingly should have been pristine-no paved road leads to it-I walked ankle-deep through microplastics. They crunched like Rice Krispies under my feet. After that, I could understand why some people see ocean plastic as a looming catastrophe, worth mentioning in the same breath as climate change. At a global summit in Nairobi last December, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme spoke of an "ocean Armageddon."

And yet there's a key difference: Ocean plastic is not as complicated as climate change. There are no ocean trash deniers, at least so far. To do something about it, we don't have to remake our planet's entire energy system.

"This isn't a problem where we don't know what the solution is," says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist who has spent more than 25 years working with developing nations on garbage. "We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to dispose of it. We know how to recycle." It's a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, he says-ideally before the ocean turns, irretrievably and for centuries to come, into a thin soup of plastic.

In Plymouth, under the gray gloom of an English autumn, Richard Thompson waited in a yellow slicker outside Plymouth University's Coxside Marine Station, at the edge of the harbor. A lean man of 54, with a smooth pate rimmed with gray hair, Thompson was headed for an ordinary career as a marine ecologist in 1993-he was working on a Ph.D. on limpets and microalgae that grow on coastal rocks-when he participated in his first beach cleanup, on the Isle of Man. While other volunteers zoomed in on the plastic bottles and bags and nets, Thompson focused on the small stuff, the tiny particles that lay underfoot, ignored, at the high tide line. At first he wasn't even sure they were plastic. He had to consult forensic chemists to confirm it.

There was a real mystery to be solved back then, at least in academic circles: Scientists wondered why they weren't finding even more plastic in the sea. World production has increased exponentially-from 2.3 million tons in 1950, it grew to 162 million in 1993 and to 448 million by 2015-but the amount of plastic drifting on the ocean and washing up on beaches, alarming as it was, didn't seem to be rising as fast. "That begs the question: Where is it?" Thompson said. "We can't establish harm to the environment unless we know where it is."

In the years since his first beach cleanup, Thompson has helped provide the beginnings of an answer: The missing plastic is getting broken into pieces so small they're hard to see. In a 2004 paper, Thompson coined the term "microplastics" for these small bits, predicting-accurately, as it turned out-that they had "potential for large-scale accumulation" in the ocean.

When we met in Plymouth last fall, Thompson and two of his students had just completed a study that indicated it's not just waves and sunlight that break down plastic. In lab tests, they'd watched amphipods of the species Orchestia gammarellus -tiny shrimplike crustaceans that are common in European coastal waters-devour pieces of plastic bags and determined they could shred a single bag into 1.75 million microscopic fragments. The little creatures chewed through plastic especially fast, Thompson's team found, when it was coated with the microbial slime that is their normal food. They spat out or eventually excreted the plastic bits.

Microplastics have been found everywhere in the ocean that people have looked, from sediments on the deepest seafloor to ice floating in the Arctic-which, as it melts over the next decade, could release more than a trillion bits of plastic into the water, according to one estimate. On some beaches on the Big Island of Hawaii, as much as 15 percent of the sand is actually grains of microplastic. Kamilo Point Beach, the one I walked on, catches plastic from the North Pacific gyre, the trashiest of five swirling current systems that transport garbage around the ocean basins and concentrate it in great patches. At Kamilo Point the beach is piled with laundry baskets, bottles, and containers with labels in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, and occasionally, Russian. On Henderson Island, an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific, researchers have found an astonishing volume of plastic from South America, Asia, New Zealand, Russia, and as far away as Scotland.

As Thompson and I talked about all this, a day boat called the Dolphin was carrying us through a light chop in the Sound, off Plymouth. Thompson reeled out a fine-mesh net called a manta trawl, usually used for studying plankton. We were close to the spot where, a few years earlier, other researchers had collected 504 fish of 10 species and given them to Thompson. Dissecting the fish, he was surprised to find microplastics in the guts of more than one-third of them. The finding made international headlines.

After we'd steamed along for a while, Thompson reeled the manta trawl back in. There was a smattering of colored plastic confetti at the bottom. Thompson himself doesn't worry much about microplastics in his fish and chips-there's little evidence yet that they pass from the gut of a fish into the flesh we actually eat. (See We Know Plastic Is Harming Marine Life. What About Us?) He worries more about the things that none of us can see-the chemicals added to plastics to give them desirable properties, such as malleability, and the even tinier nanoplastics that microplastics presumably degrade into. Those might pass into the tissues of fish and humans.

"We do know the concentrations of chemicals at the time of manufacture in some cases are very high," Thompson said. "We don't know how much additive is left in the plastic by the time it becomes bite-size to a fish.

"Nobody has found nanoparticles in the environment-they're below the level of detection for analytical equipment. People think they are out there. They have the potential to be sequestered in tissue, and that could be a game changer."

Thompson is careful not to get ahead of the science on his subject. He's far from an alarmist-but he's also convinced that plastic trash in the ocean is far more than an aesthetic problem. "I don't think we should be waiting for a key finding of whether or not fish are hazardous to eat," he said. "We have enough evidence to act."

How did we get here? When did the dark side of the miracle of plastic first show itself? It's a question that can be asked about many of the marvels of our technological world. Since helping the Allies win World War II-think of nylon parachutes or lightweight airplane parts-plastics have transformed all our lives as few other inventions have, mostly for the better. They've eased travel into space and revolutionized medicine. They lighten every car and jumbo jet today, saving fuel-and pollution. In the form of clingy, light-as-air wraps, they extend the life of fresh food. In airbags, incubators, helmets, or simply by delivering clean drinking water to poor people in those now demonized disposable bottles, plastics save lives daily.

In one of their early applications, they saved wildlife. In the mid-1800s, piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and all manner of trinkets were made of a scarce natural material: elephant ivory. With the elephant population at risk and ivory expensive and scarce, a billiards company in New York City offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could come up with an alternative.

As Susan Freinkel tells the tale in her book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, an amateur inventor named John Wesley Hyatt took up the challenge. His new material, celluloid, was made of cellulose, the polymer found in all plants. Hyatt's company boasted that it would eliminate the need "to ransack the Earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer." Besides sparing at least some elephants, celluloid also helped change billiards from solely an aristocratic pastime to one that working people play in bars.

That's a trivial example of a profound revolution ushered in by plastic-an era of material abundance. The revolution accelerated in the early 20th century, once plastics began to be made from the same stuff that was giving us abundant, cheap energy: petroleum. Oil companies had waste gases like ethylene coming out the stacks of their refineries. Chemists discovered they could use those gases as building blocks, or monomers, to create all sorts of novel polymers-polyethylene terephthalate, for example, or PET-instead of working only with polymers that already existed in nature. A world of possibilities opened up. Anything and everything could be made of plastic, and so it was, because plastics were cheap.

They were so cheap, we began to make things we never intended to keep. In 1955 Life magazine celebrated the liberation of the American housewife from drudgery. Under the headline "Throwaway Living," a photograph showed a family flinging plates, cups, and cutlery into the air. The items would take 40 hours to clean, the text noted-"except that no housewife need bother." When did plastics start to show their dark side? You might say it was when the junk in that photo hit the ground.

Six decades later, roughly 40 percent of the now more than 448 million tons of plastic produced every year is disposable, much of it used as packaging intended to be discarded within minutes after purchase. Production has grown at such a breakneck pace that virtually half the plastic ever manufactured has been made in the past 15 years. Last year the Coca-Cola Company, perhaps the world's largest producer of plastic bottles, acknowledged for the first time just how many it makes: 128 billion a year. Nestlé, PepsiCo, and others also churn out torrents of bottles.

The growth of plastic production has far outstripped the ability of waste management to keep up: That's why the oceans are under assault. "It's not surprising that we broke the system," Jambeck says. "That kind of increase would break any system not prepared for it." In 2013 a group of scientists issued a new assessment of throwaway living. Writing in Nature magazine, they declared that disposable plastic should be classified, not as a housewife's friend, but as a hazardous material.

In recent years the surge in production has been driven largely by the expanded use of disposable plastic packaging in the growing economies of Asia-where garbage collection systems may be underdeveloped or nonexistent. In 2010, according to an estimate by Jambeck, half the world's mismanaged plastic waste was generated by just five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.

"Let's say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe," says Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University who also works in his native India. "You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans. If you want to do something about this, you have to go there, to these countries, and deal with the mismanaged waste."

The Pasig River once flowed majestically through downtown Manila, capital of the Philippines, and emptied into pristine Manila Bay. It was a treasured waterway and civic point of pride. It's now listed among the top 10 rivers in the world that convey plastic waste to the sea. As many as 72,000 tons flow downstream each year, mostly during the monsoon. In 1990 the Pasig was declared biologically dead.

The Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission, established in 1999, is working to clean up the river, with some signs of success. Jose Antonio Goitia, the commission's executive director, says he is optimistic that the Pasig could be restored someday, although he acknowledges he has no easy way of doing that. "Maybe the best thing to do is ban plastic bags," he says.

The remaining challenges are clearly visible every day. The river is fed by 51 tributaries, some of them overflowing with plastic waste from squatter settlements that cantilever precariously over creek banks. A tributary near Chinatown, where rickety shanties are wedged between modern buildings, is so choked with plastic debris you can walk across it, forgoing the footbridge. Manila Bay's beaches, once recreational respites for greater Manila's 13 million residents, are littered with garbage, much of it plastic. Last fall Break Free From Plastic, a coalition including Greenpeace and other groups, cleaned a beach on Freedom Island, which is advertised as an ecotourism district; volunteers picked up 54,260 pieces of plastic, from shoes to food containers. By the time I visited a few weeks later, the beach was littered again with bottles, wrappers, and shopping bags.

The scene in Manila is typical of large, overcrowded urban centers across Asia. The Philippines is a densely populated nation of 105 million people that is still struggling with the most basic public health issues, including waterborne diseases such as typhoid and bacterial diarrhea. It's no surprise that it has trouble managing the explosion of plastic garbage. Manila has a metropolitan garbage collection system that stretches across 17 separate local governments-a source of chaos and inefficiency. In 2004 the region was already running out of land to safely dump garbage. The shortage of landfill space, and thus the crisis, continues today.

A small part of the slack is taken up by Manila's informal recycling industry, which consists of thousands of waste pickers. Armando Siena, 34, is one of them. He and his wife, Angie, 31, have lived their entire lives surrounded by trash. They were born on Smokey Mountain, an internationally notorious dump that was officially closed in the 1990s. They now live with their three children near Manila's waterfront in a one-room flat lit by a single bulb, furnished with a pair of plastic chairs, and lacking plumbing, bedding, or refrigeration. The flat is in a garbage-filled slum named Aroma, next to another slum named Happyland.

Every day Siena rides a rickety bicycle beyond Aroma's boundaries, scanning the streets for recyclable rubbish that he can stuff into his sidecar. Plastic soup containers are high-value finds, paying 20 pesos (38 cents) a kilogram. Siena sorts and sells his load to a junk shop owned by his uncle, who trucks the waste to recycling plants on the outskirts of Manila.

Waste pickers like Siena are part of the solution, some activists argue; they just need a living wage. In the Baseco waterfront slum in Manila, a tiny recycling shop operated by the Plastic Bank of Vancouver, British Columbia, pays a premium for bottles and hard plastic collected by waste pickers. It then sells that plastic at a higher price to multinationals, which market their recycled products as socially responsible.

Siegler, the Vermont economist, has worked in enough countries and run enough numbers to be skeptical of such schemes. "There is not enough value in plastics to make that work," he says. "It's cheaper to fund a solid waste management system than to subsidize collecting plastic."

The waste that clogs Manila's beaches and waterways reinforces Siegler's point. Much of it consists of sachets-tear-off packets that once held a single serving of shampoo, toothpaste, coffee, condiments, or other products. They are sold by the millions to poor people like Siena and his family, who can't afford to buy more than one serving at a time. Sachets blow around Manila like leaves falling from trees. They're not recyclable, so no waste picker will retrieve them. Crispian Lao, a member of the National Solid Waste Management Commission, says, "This segment of packaging is growing, and it has become a real challenge for solid waste management."

When Greenpeace cleaned the Freedom Island beach, it posted a tally of the brand names of the sachets its volunteers had collected. Nestlé ranked first, Unilever second. Litterbugs aren't the only ones at fault, says Greenpeace's Abigail Aguilar: "We believe that the ones producing and promoting the use of single-use plastics have a major role in the whole problem." A Unilever spokeswoman in Manila told me the company is developing a recyclable sachet.

After Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar screens in March 2014 while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the search for it extended from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean. It captivated a global audience for weeks. No sign of the wreckage appeared. On several occasions, when satellite images revealed collections of objects floating on the sea surface, hopes soared that they would turn out to be aircraft parts. They weren't. It was all trash-pieces of broken shipping containers, abandoned fishing gear, and of course, plastic shopping bags.

Kathleen Dohan, a scientist and the president of Earth and Space Research in Seattle, saw opportunity in the horror: The images from space were pushing a problem into view that had long been neglected. "This is the first time the whole world is watching," she told me at the time. "It's a good time for people to understand that our oceans are garbage dumps." Dohan sensed a tipping point in public awareness-and the events since suggest she may have been right.

The most heartening thing about the plastic waste problem is the recent explosion of attention to it, and even of serious, if scattered, efforts to address it. A partial list of the good news since 2014 would include, in no particular order: Kenya joined a growing list of nations that have banned plastic bags, imposing steep fines and jail time on violators. France said it would ban plastic plates and cups by 2020. Bans on plastic microbeads in cosmetics (they're exfoliants) take effect this year in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and four other countries. The industry is phasing them out.

Corporations are responding to public opinion. Coca-Cola, which also produces Dasani water, announced a goal to "collect and recycle the equivalent of" 100 percent of its packaging by 2030. It and other multinationals, including PepsiCo, Amcor, and Unilever, have pledged to convert to 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2025. And Johnson & Johnson is switching from plastic back to paper stems on its cotton swabs.

Individuals are making a difference too. Ellen MacArthur, a British yachtswoman, has created a foundation to promote the vision of a "circular economy," in which all materials, including plastics, are designed to be reused or recycled, not dumped. Actor Adrian Grenier has lent his celebrity to the campaign against the plastic drinking straw. And Boyan Slat, 23, from the Netherlands, is charging ahead with his teenage vow to clean up the largest garbage patch in the North Pacific. His organization has raised more than $30 million to construct an ocean-sweeping machine that is still under development.

All of these measures help at some level-even beach cleanups, futile as they sometimes seem. A beach cleanup hooked Richard Thompson on the plastic problem a quarter century ago. But the real solution, he now thinks, is to stop plastic from entering the ocean in the first place-and then to rethink our whole approach to the amazing stuff. "We've done a lot of work making sure plastic does its job, but very little amount of work on what happens to that product at the end of its lifetime," he says. "I'm not saying plastics are the enemy, but there is a lot the industry can do to help solve the problem."

There are two fundamental ways industry can help, if it wants or is forced to. First, along with academic scientists such as Jambeck, it can design new plastics and new plastic products that are either biodegradable or more recyclable (see You Can Help Turn the Tide on Plastic. Here's How.). New materials and more recycling, along with simply avoiding unnecessary uses of the stuff, are the long-term solutions to the plastic waste problem. But the fastest way to make a big difference, Siegler says, is low tech. It's more garbage trucks and landfills.

"Everyone wants a sexy answer," he says. "The reality is, we need to just collect the trash. Most countries that I work in, you can't even get it off the street. We need garbage trucks and help institutionalizing the fact that this waste needs to be collected on a regular basis and landfilled, recycled, or burned so that it doesn't end up going all over the place."

That's the second way industry could help: It could pony up. Siegler has proposed a worldwide tax of a penny on every pound of plastic resin manufactured. The tax would raise roughly six billion dollars a year that could be used to finance garbage collection systems in developing nations. The idea never caught on. In the fall of 2017, though, a group of scientists revived the concept of a global fund. The group called for an international agreement patterned after the Paris climate accord.

At the Nairobi meeting in December, 193 nations, including the U.S., actually passed one. The United Nations Clean Seas agreement doesn't impose a tax on plastic. It's nonbinding and toothless. It's really just a declaration of a good intention-the intention to end ocean plastic pollution. In that way it's less like the Paris Agreement and more like the Rio de Janeiro treaty, in which the world pledged to combat dangerous climate change-back in 1992. Norway's environment minister, Vidar Helgesen, called this new agreement a strong first step.

Staff writer Laura Parker and photographer Randy Olson last worked together on a feature on the vanishing Ogallala aquifer, which was published in the August 2016 issue.

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