Eddy's Good News: The power of music and did Romans really invent roads?!

Virgin Radio

15 May 2023, 10:19

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Monday 15th May 2023

An amazing and encouraging bit of research from Switzerland now shows that picking up a musical instrument for the first time, late in life, can increase your neuroplasticity and slow down cognitive decline.

Say hello to the University of Geneva, who studied 100 retired people and split them into two groups, one who learned a new musical instrument and had music awareness lessons, the others were in the control group.

They monitored their brains closely and recorded any changes. Fascinatingly, the group who learned the piano showed, after six months, that certain parts of their cerebellum had grown by 6%. This correlated to a 6% increase in their cognitive memory functions. The control group showed normal decline. Neuroplasticity is something I've been banging on about a lot since I found out, from research done at Stanford University, that it doesn’t stop working when we get old, that it’s there for us until the day we die, so it’s never too late to pick up an instrument and learn, in fact it’s really good for your brain and can slow the mental decline which hurts so many people these days. Don’t let the cost of living get in the way, you can get a roll up piano on eBay for £8.99 and YouTube tutorials are free!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Phenomenal news from Croatia where they’ve found an old road, which doesn’t sound that impressive until you hear this road is 7000 years old. 

Say hello to the beautiful island of Korcula, in the Adriatic sea, said to be the birthplace of Marco Polo and a forward thinking place, the first to outlaw slavery, in 1214. Now archaeologists have uncovered a four metre wide stone paved road that they’ve carbon dated at 5000 years before Romans were even a thing.

That whole Roman “we invented roads” narrative that we were taught at school has now been discredited. We have a ‘classical’ education and are less educated for it. The Romans rewrote history with themselves as the greatest thing in it. Now we know that Celts built roads, straight as an arrow, across peat bogs and marshes, that would be a challenge even for an engineer today, and did so long before Roman roads existed. Indian engineers built brick roads 3000 years before any Romans, paved roads were built in Sumer 4000 years before the Romans and now we have a Hvar culture from modern day Croatia building stone paved roads 5000 years previously. History was a lot more international than we were led to believe!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org