What would happen if the music stopped playing?

You see the wires hanging from the ears and running over the side of the cheeks and disappearing into the phone on their hands. If you are close enough, you will hear the music blaring. It is hard to miss this spectacle.

If you hop into any matatu in Nairobi you are likely to encounter two things; the matatu driver bribing a police officer and young adult wearing earphones. The university hostels seem to have an unspoken truce that whoever plays music loudest acquires bragging rights. The love for music by these youngsters is unmistakable.

However the same love and interest is lost in their lifelong career decisions. Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service placed Bachelor of Education (music) and Bachelor of Art (music) as the least applied for courses in 2015.

The irony of that revelation by KUCCPS is loud. Scientists have it that something drastic would happen if the drums and beats stopped in the world.

Dr Charles Limb of John Hopkins hospital is quoted during an interview with a CNN reporter saying that there is enough evidence that music exposure, training and experience affect the brain. One psychologist agrees, especially in relation to the human memory.

Daniel Levitin told the CNN journalist that the structures used to respond to music evolved earlier than those for language. This means that our ancestors were jamming to their own beats long before they could curve words.

The same concept lives on today. A significant number of your favourite advertisements have catchy theme songs. Chances are, the reason you remember any advertisement is because of the song in the background. Nursery school teachers discovered this and the lunch time choruses still echo in our minds today.

Music therapy

The meta-analysis publication by levitin and colleagues documented an experiment with patients who were about to go for surgery. They gave the patients options to either listen to music or to take anti-anxiety drugs. The results of the experiment favored the music listeners as they became less anxious than the patients on anti-anxiety drugs.

350 million people worldwide suffer from depression, according to WHO. But researchers from university of Jyvaskyla in Finland believe that music could remedy depression. Their findings published in British Journal of psychiatry state that music therapy combined with standard care could significantly reduce depression cases. They recruited 79 people diagnosed with depression and gave them an option of twenty 60 minute sessions of music. The 33 people who agreed to the music therapy showed significant improvement compared to the 46 who received routine standard care.

The mystery of hanging earphones in Kenya has arguably been unveiled by the conclusions of all those research. It is an open secret that the Kenyan youth has not been doing very well. The university homicides, the high school drug use, mass examination failure and suicides are loud enough signs.

Perhaps, five minutes of their favorite song is usually the only sound of sanity they often experience. If any of that is to be believed then a question has to be asked, what would happen if the music stopped playing? Can you imagine a world with no escapism in the melody and rhythm?

The dawn of that reality may be in the horizon if the Kenyan students keep chasing the doctor and engineer title. Studies have revealed that upon completion of secondary education, many students join universities, colleges and technical institutes to pursue careers that do not match their capabilities and often make vocational choices based speculation.

Related: 10 million Kenyans are mad, new health report shows

Career planning should always start from knowledge of self & purpose discovery before pursuing only what is deemed as prestigious careers. This can be achieved through taking a scientific and validated career test.

So are most students pursuing the wrong careers? Research conducted by the Ministry of Education in 2007 revealed that over 75% of Kenyans are misaligned. For example John Owuor who loves expressing himself through artistic means (music), feelings, imagination, intuition and who has a constant search for novelty gets an A in KCSE. It is unthinkable to his parents and peers for him to snub medicine for music, yet, his true talent lies in the arts! John pursues medicine but he lives his life dissatisfied with very many ‘what ifs..’!

If John took Discover Your Career psychometric test he could have discovered that he has a very artistic sensitivity with a desire to express himself through emotions and would have taken Music bachelor to fulfill his life purpose.

There is no doubt that majority of us have taken more online tests than we have liked to. Some annoyingly pop up on our internet pages, especially when we are busy trying to beat a deadline. What would make this one different?

This test has been approved by leading psychologists in the world. It has also been approved by the American Psychological Association, the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States, with about 170,200 licensed psychologists.