{"id":293,"date":"2014-07-22T03:43:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T03:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/brain_blog\/?p=293"},"modified":"2014-11-16T23:40:19","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T23:40:19","slug":"neuroscience-and-music-early-music-lessons-highly-recommended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/brain_blog\/2014\/07\/neuroscience-and-music-early-music-lessons-highly-recommended\/","title":{"rendered":"Neuroscience and Music: Early music lessons highly recommended"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The 90’s were called the Era of the Brain. \u00a0Many people believed that the brain was the last unexplored frontier and today, in 2014, people are still learning fascinating and very useful things about how music affects the brain. \u00a0For years, people have known that when little children are exposed to music, especially music lessons, they seem to do better academically for the rest of their school lives. \u00a0Studying music helps to organize the brain and encourages logical and relational thinking. \u00a0Once these skills are begun, then the individual can break away knowledgeably and begin to improvise, compose their own music and practice, practice, practice.<\/p>\n

Today, a friend sent me a new article about all of this, and I wanted to share it with my readers!<\/p>\n

“How Playing Music Affects the Developing Brain” \u00a0July 17, 2014 | 6:04 AM<\/span>\u00a0|\u00a0<\/span>George Hicks<\/a>, WBUR, Boston<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Remember \u201cMozart Makes You Smarter\u201d?<\/p>\n

A\u00a01993 study<\/a>\u00a0of college students showed them performing better on spatial reasoning tests after listening to a Mozart sonata. That led to claims that listening to Mozart temporarily increases IQs \u2014 and to a raft of\u00a0products<\/a>\u00a0purporting to provide all sorts of benefits to the brain.<\/p>\n

In 1998, Zell Miller, then the governor of Georgia, even proposed providing every newborn in his state with a CD of classical music.<\/p>\n

But subsequent research has cast doubt on the claims.<\/p>\n

Ani Patel, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University and the author of \u201cMusic, Language, and the Brain<\/a>,\u201d says that while listening to music can be relaxing and contemplative, the idea that simply plugging in your iPod is going to make you more intelligent doesn\u2019t quite hold up to scientific scrutiny.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the other hand,\u201d Patel says, \u201cthere\u2019s now a growing body of work that suggests that actually learning to play a musical instrument does have impacts on other abilities.\u201d These include speech perception, the ability to understand emotions in the voice and the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Patel says this is a relatively new field of scientific study.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole field of music neuroscience really began to take off around 2000,\u201d he says. \u201cThese studies where we take people, often children, and give them training in music and then measure how their cognition changes and how their brain changes both in terms of its processing [and] its structure, are very few and still just emerging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patel says that music neuroscience, which draws on cognitive science, music education and neuroscience, can help answer basic questions about the workings of the human brain.
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\n\u201cHow do we process sequences with complex hierarchical structure and make sense of them?\u201d he asks. \u201cHow do we integrate sensation and action? How do we remember long and difficult sequences of information? These are fundamental neuroscience questions, and music can help us answer some of these questions, because it\u2019s in some ways simpler than language, but it\u2019s still of sufficient complexity that it can address these very deep and important aspects of human brain function.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, Patel says music neuroscience research has important implications about the role of music in the lives of young children.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we know how and why music changes the brain in ways that affect other cognitive abilities,\u201d he says, \u201cthis could have a real impact on the value we put on it as an activity in the schools, not to mention all the impact it has on emotional development, emotional maturity, social skills, stick-to-itiveness, things we typically don\u2019t measure in school but which are hugely important in a child\u2019s ultimate success.\u201d<\/p>\n