Benefits of learning music

Benefits of learning music Many a time during my music workshops and music forums for music students and parents, I have informed them that learning music goes beyond just knowing how to read music and playing a musical instrument.

There is a lot more to learning music. There are numerous reports and articles published by educational institutions (colleges and universities), independent researches and the likes about the virtues of learning music.

However, not all may know what exactly to look for on the internet. Some may not specifically know what the key words are to type on the search engine. Quite tedious a task and time consuming too.

So, I shall do the next best thing to promote the virtues of learning music by listing some of the sites I have read for your reading convenience. Some of these reports/articles may seem rather lengthy but I do encourage you to read through them anyway.

Just click on the link and it will take you to the site about the benefits of music education. These are just a few among many others for you (the student, the parent, the general public) to get started on.

1. 18 Benefits of Playing a Musical instrument http://www.effectivemusicteaching.com/articles/directors/18-benefits-of-playing-a-musical-instrument/ 2. Twelve benefits of Music education http://www.childrensmusicworkshop.com/advocacy/12benefits.html 3. Benefits of Music lessons http://www.parents.com/kids/development/intellectual/benefits-of-music-lessons/ 4. How music helps the aging brain. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140103-music-lessons-brain-aging-cognitiveneuroscience/ 5. More evidence that music benefits the brain http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/814540 6. Why we need music in our hearts http://www.childrensmusicworkshop.com/advocacy/wwnm.html 7. The Mozart Effect http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/lerch1/edpsy/mozart_effect.html 8. Music and Intelligence: A parent's evidence-based guide http://www.parentingscience.com/music-and-intelligence.html Follow us on blog at http://musicperformanceappreciation.blogspot.com

Source: http://www.effectivemusicteaching.com/articles/directors/18-benefits-of-playing-a-musical-instrument/ 18 Benefits of Playing a Musical Instrument by Michael Matthews The Chinese philosopher Confucius said long ago that "Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without." Playing a musical instrument has many benefits and can bring joy to you and to everyone around you. This article will provide you with 18 benefits of playing an instrument (in no particular order) and will hopefully give you a better sense of appreciation and pride for music.

1. Increases the capacity of your memory.

Research has shown that both listening to music and playing a musical instrument stimulate your brain and can increase your memory. A study was done in which 22 children from age 3 to 4 and a half years old were given either singing lessons or keyboard lessons. A control group of 15 children received no music lessons at all. Both groups participated in the same preschool activities. The results showed that preschoolers who had weekly keyboard lessons improved their spatial-temporal skills 34 percent more than the other children. Not only that, but researchers said that the effect lasted long-term.

(Source: http://brainconnection.positscience.com/topics/?main=fa/music-education2#A1) According to an article from The Telegraph online magazine, "New research suggests that regularly playing an instrument changes the shape and power of the brain and may be used in therapy to improve cognitive skills."

There is continually more evidence that musicians have organizationally and functionally different brains compared to non-musicians, especially in the areas of the brain used in processing and playing music. If you learn how to play an instrument, the parts of your brain that control motor skills (ex: using your hands, running, swimming, balancing, etc.), hearing, storing audio information, and memory actually grow and become more active. Other results show that playing an instrument can help your IQ increase by seven points. (Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6447588/Playing-a-musical-instrument-makes-youbrainier.html) 2. Refines your time management and organizational skills.

Learning how to play an instrument requires you to really learn how to be organized and to manage your time wisely. A good musician knows that the quality of practice time is more valuable than the quantity. In order for a musician to progress quicker, he/she will learn how to organize his/her practice time and plan different challenges to work on, making efficient use of time.

3. Boosts your team skills.

Team skills are a very important aspect of being successful in life. Playing an instrument requires you to work with others to make music. In band and orchestra settings you must learn how to cooperate with the people around you. Also, in order for a group to make beautiful music, each player and section must learn how to listen to each other and play together.

4. Teaches you perseverance.

Learning to play an instrument takes time and effort, which really teaches you patience and perseverance.

Most people can't play every piece of music perfectly the first time. In fact, the majority of musicians have to work difficult sections of music multiple times in a row before they can play it correctly.

5. Enhances your coordination.

The art of playing an instrument requires a lot of hand-eye coordination. By reading musical notes on a page, your brain subconsciously must convert that note into specific motor patterns while also adding breathing and rhythm to the mix.

6. Betters your mathematical ability.

Reading music requires counting notes and rhythms and can help your math skills. Also, learning music theory includes many mathematical aspects. Studies have shown that students who play instruments or study the arts are often better in math and achieve higher grades in school than students who don't. (Source: Friedman, B. (1959) An evaluation of the achievement in reading and arithmetic of pupils in elementary schools instrumental classes. Dissertation Abstracts International, 20, pp.s 3662-3663.)

7. Improves your reading and comprehension skills.

According to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music, "Children exposed to a multi-year program of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers."

(Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090316075843.htm) It's not surprising to hear results like that because music involves constant reading and comprehension. When you see black and white notes on a page, you have to recognize what the note name is and translate it to a finger/slide position. At the same time, you also have to read what rhythms the notes are arranged in and force your tongue to produce the correct pattern.

8. Increases your responsibility.

Playing an instrument comes with its responsibilities. Maintenance and care are very important in keeping an instrument in working condition. Each instrument has different procedures to keep in functioning properly, but most instruments need cleaning and some form of oiling/greasing. In addition to maintenance

responsibilities, there are other aspects such as remembering music events (like rehearsals and performances) and making time to practice.

9. Exposes you to cultural history.

Oftentimes music reflects the environment and times of its creation. Therefore, you learn a variety of music types such as classical traditions, folk music, medieval, and other genres. Music itself is history, and each piece usually has its own background and storyline that can further your appreciation of other cultures.

10. Sharpens your concentration.

Playing music by yourself requires you to concentrate on things like pitch, rhythm, tempo, note duration, and quality of sound. Playing music in a group involves even more concentration because you must learn to not only hear yourself, but you must listen to all the other sections and play in harmony with the rest of the group.

11. Fosters your self-expression and relieves stress.

It's your instrument, so you can play whatever you want on it! The more advanced you become on an instrument, the greater you'll be able to play what you want and how you want. Music is an art--just like an artist can paint his/her emotions onto a canvas, so can a musician play a piece with emotion. This has proven to relieve stress and can be a great form of therapy. In fact, music therapy has been useful in treating children and teens with autism, depression, and other disorders.

12. Creates a sense of achievement.

Overcoming musical challenges that you thought you'd never quite master can give you a great sense of pride about yourself. When you first start learning how to play an instrument, it seems like just holding out a note for a couple beats or hitting a high pitch is an amazing accomplishment. As you practice and become a more experienced musician, making beautiful sounding music pleasing not only to your ear, but others as well is a very rewarding experience.

13. Promotes your social skills.

Playing an instrument can be a great way to enhance your social skills. Some of the best people join bands and orchestras, and many times the friends you make here become like family. It's very common for people to gain lifelong friendships through musical activities like these.

14. Boosts your listening skills.

Although it's pretty obvious, playing an instrument requires you to listen very carefully to things. You have to learn how to hear when you're playing a wrong note in order to correct yourself. Tuning your instrument means hearing if the pitch you're playing is high (sharp) or low (flat). When playing in an ensemble, you have to listen for the melody and play softer if you're the supporting part (accompaniment). There are too many examples to list every possibility here, but by playing an instrument you are guaranteed to improve your listening skills.

15. Teaches you discipline.

As previously mentioned, playing an instrument can be very challenging. One of the qualities that musicians learn is discipline. Practicing often and working on the hard parts of music and not just the easy and fun stuff requires discipline. The best musicians in the world are masters of discipline which is why they are so successful on their instrument.

16. Elevates your performance skills and reduces stage fright.

One of the goals of practicing so much on your instrument is so that you can perform for others. The more you get up in front of people and perform, the more you'll reduce any stage fright. Playing on stage in a band or orchestra helps with stage fright because you're not alone. Also, being prepared and really knowing how to play your part makes it much easier to get up and play for a crowd.

17. Enhances your respiratory system.

If you have a good music director/tutor, you should hear them tell you quite often to "use more air!" Air is one of the key components in making wonderful-sounding music. In order to play any piece of music correctly when playing an instrument, you'll need to take huge breaths and learn how to expel the air properly to make the desired sound. Breathing exercises are highly recommended for musicians, and they can really strengthen your respiratory system.

18. Promotes happiness in your life and those around you.

Playing a musical instrument can be very fun and exciting. Not only is it fun to play music that you enjoy, but it feels wonderful to hear an audience applaud you for giving a great performance. It can also be very honorable and gratifying to voluntarily play in your local community and see the happiness on people's faces because they enjoy watching you play.

Conclusion As you can see, playing a musical instrument has many benefits and hopefully that will motivate you to keep on practicing and always hold music in high esteem. Whenever you come across challenges as a musician, think about the end results and always remind yourself of all the great reasons you love to play. I'll leave you with an inspiring quote by jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker who once said, "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.�

Š EffectiveMusicTeaching.com

Source: http://www.childrensmusicworkshop.com/advocacy/12benefits.html

Twelve Benefits of Music Education Music Education Advocacy Resources

1. Early musical training helps develop brain areas involved in language and reasoning. It is thought that brain development continues for many years after birth. Recent studies have clearly indicated that musical training physically develops the part of the left side of the brain known to be involved with processing language, and can actually wire the brain's circuits in specific ways. Linking familiar songs to new information can also help imprint information on young minds.

2. There is also a causal link between music and spatial intelligence (the ability to perceive the world accurately and to form mental pictures of things). This kind of intelligence, by which one can visualize various elements that should go together, is critical to the sort of thinking necessary for everything from solving advanced mathematics problems to being able to pack a book-bag with everything that will be needed for the day.

3. Students of the arts learn to think creatively and to solve problems by imagining various solutions, rejecting outdated rules and assumptions. Questions about the arts do not have only one right answer.

4. Recent studies show that students who study the arts are more successful on standardized tests such as the SAT. They also achieve higher grades in high school.

5. A study of the arts provides children with an internal glimpse of other cultures and teaches them to be empathetic towards the people of these cultures. This development of compassion and empathy, as opposed to development of greed and a "me first" attitude, provides a bridge across cultural chasms that leads to respect of other races at an early age.

6. Students of music learn craftsmanship as they study how details are put together painstakingly and what constitutes good, as opposed to mediocre, work. These standards, when applied to a student's own work, demand a new level of excellence and require students to stretch their inner resources.

7. In music, a mistake is a mistake; the instrument is in tune or not, the notes are well played or not, the entrance is made or not. It is only by much hard work that a successful performance is possible. Through music study, students learn the value of sustained effort to achieve excellence and the concrete rewards of hard work.

8. Music study enhances teamwork skills and discipline. In order for an orchestra to sound good, all players must work together harmoniously towards a single goal, the performance, and must commit to learning music, attending rehearsals, and practicing.

9. Music provides children with a means of self-expression. Now that there is relative security in the basics of existence, the challenge is to make life meaningful and to reach for a higher stage of development. Everyone needs to be in touch at some time in his life with his core, with what he is and what he feels. Self-esteem is a by-product of this self-expression.

10. Music study develops skills that are necessary in the workplace. It focuses on "doing," as opposed to observing, and teaches students how to perform, literally, anywhere in the world. Employers are looking for multi-dimensional workers with the sort of flexible and supple intellects that music education helps to create as described above. In the music classroom, students can also learn to better communicate and cooperate with one another.

11. Music performance teaches young people to conquer fear and to take risks. A little anxiety is a good thing, and something that will occur often in life. Dealing with it early and often makes it less of a problem later. Risk-taking is essential if a child is to fully develop his or her potential. Music contributes to mental health and can help prevent risky behavior such as teenage drug abuse, which often leads to institutionalization in a teen rehab.

12. An arts education exposes children to the incomparable.

Carolyn Phillips is the author of the Twelve Benefits of Music Education. She is the Former Executive Director of the Norwalk Youth Symphony, CT.

Source: http://www.parents.com/kids/development/intellectual/benefits-of-music-lessons/

Benefits of Music Lessons

Learning to play an instrument can help your child fine-tune her ear and enhance skills needed for education and social interaction.

By Angela Kwan Between soccer and scouts, your school-age kid's schedule is loaded with fun activities. If you're on the fence about adding music classes to the list, take note of the benefits that come with signing your little one up for violin or piano lessons. Maybe she won't be the next Beethoven, but she may have an easier time learning math, practicing good manners (including patience!), and becoming a team player. Read on to learn more about the benefits of music education.

It improves academic skills.

Music and math are highly intertwined. By understanding beat, rhythm, and scales, children are learning how to divide, create fractions, and recognize patterns. It seems that music wires a child's brain to help him better understand other areas of math, says Lynn Kleiner, founder of Music Rhapsody in Redondo Beach, CA. As kids get older, they'll start reciting songs, calling on their short-term memory and eventually their longterm memory. Using a mnemonic device to do this is a method that can later be applied to other memory skills, says Mary Larew, Suzuki violin teacher at the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Musical instrument classes also introduce young children to basic physics. For instance, plucking the strings on a guitar or violin teaches children about harmonic and sympathetic vibrations. Even non-string instruments, such as drums and the vibraphone, give big kids the opportunity to explore these scientific principles.

It develops physical skills.

Certain instruments, such as percussion, help children develop coordination and motor skills; they require movement of the hands, arms, and feet. This type of instrument is great for high-energy kids, says Kristen Regester, Early Childhood Program Manager at Sherwood Community Music School at Columbia College Chicago. String and keyboard instruments, like the violin and piano, demand different actions from your right and left hands simultaneously. "It's like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time," Regester says. Instruments not only help develop ambidexterity, but they can also encourage children to become comfortable in naturally uncomfortable positions. Enhancing coordination and perfecting timing can prepare children for other hobbies, like dance and sports.

It cultivates social skills.

Group classes require peer interaction and communication, which encourage teamwork, as children must collaborate to create a crescendo or an accelerando. If a child is playing his instrument too loudly or speeding up too quickly, he'll need to adjust. It's important for children to know and understand their individual part in a larger ensemble, Regester says. Music Rhapsody offers general music education classes, in which teachers split students into groups and assign each child a task. Whether a team is responsible for choosing instruments or creating a melody, students work toward a common goal. "These are the kinds of experiences we have in society," Kleiner says. "We need more group interaction and problem solving."

It refines discipline and patience.

Learning an instrument teaches children about delayed gratification. The violin, for example, has a steep learning curve. Before you can make a single sound, you must first learn how to hold the violin, how to hold the bow, and where to place your feet, Larew says. Playing an instrument teaches kids to persevere through hours, months, and sometimes years of practice before they reach specific goals, such as performing with a band or memorizing a solo piece. "Private lessons and practicing at home require a very focused kind of attention for even 10 minutes at a time," Larew says. Group lessons, in which students learn to play the same instruments in an ensemble, also improve patience, as children must wait their turn to play individually. And in waiting for their turns and listening to their classmates play, kids learn to show their peers respect, to sit still and be quiet for designated periods of time, and to be attentive.

It boosts self-esteem.

Lessons offer a forum where children can learn to accept and give constructive criticism. Turning negative feedback into positive change helps build self-confidence, Regester says. Group lessons, in particular, may help children understand that nobody, including themselves or their peers, is perfect, and that everyone has room for improvement. "Presenting yourself in public is an important skill whether you become a professional musician or not," Larew says. This skill is easily transferrable to public speaking, she adds. And, of course, once a child is advanced enough, she'll possess musical skills that will help her stand out.

It introduces children to other cultures.

By learning about and playing a variety of instruments, kids can discover how music plays a critical role in other cultures. For instance, bongos and timbales may introduce children to African and Cuban styles of music. Although the modern-day violin has roots in Italy, learning to play it exposes children to classical music popularized by German and Austrian musicians. Versatile instruments, such as the violin and piano, can accompany a wide repertoire of styles, including classical and jazz (which originated in the American South).

It's important to familiarize children with other cultures at a young age because this fosters open-mindedness about worlds and traditions beyond the ones they know.

What to Consider When Selecting an Instrument Ultimately, the instrument you and your child choose should depend on a number of factors. Here's a list of questions to consider before bringing home a new music maker: Is your child excited about the instrument? Does she like the way it sounds and feels? Some music schools offer a "petting zoo" that introduces kids to multiple instruments.

Is the instrument too challenging or is it not challenging enough (for both you and your child)?

Does your child's temperament match the instrument?

Can you afford the instrument and the maintenance that comes with it?

As a parent, do you like the sound enough to listen to your child practice it for hours at home?

Is your child specifically interested in a particular music style? If so, factor that into your instrument choice, as some specifically cater to certain styles. For instance, a violin player will have a hard time fitting in a jazz ensemble.

Experts don't always agree on which instruments are best for big kids to learn, but many music teachers do agree that it's hard to go wrong with the piano, percussion (like the drum or xylophone), recorder, guitar, or violin.

Copyright Š 2013 Meredith Corporation.

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140103-music-lessons-brain-aging-cognitive-neuroscience/

Your Aging Brain Will Be in Better Shape If You've Taken Music Lessons

Studies are showing that learning to play an instrument can bring significant improvements in your brain.

Musical training in childhood creates additional neural connections that can last a lifetime.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JANINE WIEDEL PHOTOLIBRARY/ALAMY

By Diane Cole for National Geographic PUBLISHED JANUARY 3, 2014 Part of our weekly "In Focus" series—stepping back, looking closer.

Are music lessons the way to get smarter?

That's what a lot of parents (and experts) believe: Studying an instrument gives children an advantage in the development of their intellectual, perceptual, and cognitive skills. This may, however, turn out to be wishful thinking. Two new randomized trials have found no evidence for the belief. The IQs of preschoolers who attended several weeks of music classes as part of these studies did not differ significantly from the IQs of those who had not.

But that does not mean that the advantages of learning to play music are limited to expressing yourself, impressing friends, or just having fun. A growing number of studies show that music lessons in childhood can do something perhaps more valuable for the brain than childhood gains: provide benefits for the long run, as we age, in the form of an added defense against memory loss, cognitive decline, and diminished ability to distinguish consonants and spoken words.

Not only that, you may well get those benefits even if you haven't tickled the ivories, strummed the guitar, or unpacked your instrument from its case in years. And dividends could even be in store if you decide to pick up an instrument for the very first time in midlife or beyond.

The reason is that musical training can have a "profound" and lasting impact on the brain, creating additional neural connections in childhood that can last a lifetime and thus help compensate for cognitive declines later in life, says neuropsychologist Brenda Hanna-Pladdy of Emory University in Atlanta. Those many hours spent learning and practicing specific types of motor control and coordination (each finger on each hand doing something different, and for wind and brass instruments, also using your mouth and breathing), along with the music-reading and listening skills that go into playing an instrument in youth, are all factors contributing to the brain boost that shows up later in life.

Musical Training Grows Your Brain You can even map the impact of musical training on the brain: In a 2003 study, Harvard neurologist Gottfried Schlaug found that the brains of adult professional musicians had a larger volume of gray matter than the brains of nonmusicians had. Schlaug and colleagues also found that after 15 months of musical training in early childhood, structural brain changes associated with motor and auditory improvements begin to appear.

Still other studies have shown an increase in the volume of white matter. Such findings speak to the brain's plasticity—its ability to change or adapt in response to experience, environment, or behavior. It also shows the power of musical training to enhance and build connections within the brain.

"What's unique about playing an instrument is that it requires a wide array of brain regions and cognitive functions to work together simultaneously, in both right and left hemispheres of the brain," says Alison Balbag, a professional harpist who began musical training at the age of five, holds a doctorate in music, and is currently earning her Ph.D. in gerontology (with a special focus on the impact of music on health throughout the life span) at the University of Southern California. Playing music may be an efficient way to stimulate the brain, she says, cutting across a broad swath of its regions and cognitive functions and with ripple effects through the decades.

The Longer You Played an Instrument, the Better More research is showing this might well be the case. In Hanna-Pladdy's first study on the subject, published in 2011, she divided 70 healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 83 into three groups: musicians who had studied an instrument for at least ten years, those who had played between one and nine years, and a control group who had never learned an instrument or how to read music. Then she had each of the subjects take a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests.

The group who had studied for at least ten years scored the highest in such areas as nonverbal and visuospatial memory, naming objects, and taking in and adapting new information. By contrast, those with no musical training performed least well, and those who had played between one and nine years were in the middle.

In other words, the more they had trained and played, the more benefit the participants had gained. But, intriguingly, they didn't lose all of the benefits even when they hadn't played music in decades.

Hanna-Pladdy's second study, published in 2012, confirmed those findings and further suggested that starting musical training before the age of nine (which seems to be a critical developmental period) and keeping at it for ten years or more may yield the greatest benefits, such as increased verbal working memory, in later adulthood. That long-term benefit does not depend on how much other education you received in life.

Starting musical training before age nine and continuing for a decade may yield the greatest benefits.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAULA SOLLOWAY, ALAMY "We found that the adults who benefited the most in older age were those with lower educational levels," she says. "[Musical training] could be making up for the lack of cognitive stimulation they had academically." She points to the important role music education can play, especially at a time when music curricula are falling prey to school system budget cuts.

Playing Music Improves Your Ability to Discern Sounds Neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University in Chicago found still more positive effects on older adults of early musical training—this time, in the realm of hearing and communication. She measured the electrical activity in the auditory brainstems of 44 adults, ages 55 to 76, as they responded to the synthesized speech syllable "da." Although none of the subjects had played a musical instrument in 40 years, those who had trained the longest—between four and fourteen years—responded the fastest.

That's significant, says Kraus, because hearing tends to decline as we age, including the ability to quickly and accurately discern consonants, a skill crucial to understanding and participating in conversation.

"If your nervous system is not keeping up with the timing necessary for encoding consonants—did you say bill or pill or fill, or hat or that—even if the vowel part is understood," you will lose out on the flow and meaning of the conversation, says Kraus, and that can potentially lead to a downward spiral of feeling socially isolated.

The reason, she speculates, may be that musical training focuses on a very precise connection between sound and meaning. Students focus on the note on a page and the sound that it represents, on the ways sounds do (and don't) go together, on passages that are to be played with a specific emotion. In addition, they're using their motor system to create those sounds through their fingers.

"All of these relationships have to occur very precisely as you learn to play, and perhaps you carry that with you throughout your life," she says. The payoff is the ability to discern specific sounds—like syllables and words in conversation—with greater clarity.

There may be other potentially significant listening and hearing benefits in later life as well, she suspects, though she has not yet tested them. "Musicians throughout their lives, and as they age, hear better in noisy environments," she says. "Difficulty in hearing words against a noisy background is a common complaint among people as they get older."

In addition, the fact that musical training appears to enhance auditory working memory—needed to improvise, memorize, play in time, and tune your instrument—might help reinforce in later life the memory capacity that facilitates communication and conversation.

You Can Start Now It's not too late to gain benefits even if you didn't take up an instrument until later in life. Jennifer Bugos, an assistant professor of music education at the University of South Florida, Tampa, studied the impact of individual piano instruction on adults between the ages of 60 and 85. After six months, those who had received piano lessons showed more robust gains in memory, verbal fluency, the speed at which they processed information, planning ability, and other cognitive functions, compared with those who had not received lessons.

More research on the subject is forthcoming from Bugos and from other researchers in what appears to be a burgeoning field. Hervé Platel, a professor of neuropsychology at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, France, is embarking on a neuroimaging study of healthy, aging nonmusicians just beginning to study a musical instrument.

And neuroscientist Julene Johnson, a professor at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, is now investigating the possible cognitive, motor, and physical benefits garnered by older adults who begin singing in a choir after the age of 60. She'll also be looking the psychosocial and quality-of-life aspects.

"People often shy away from learning to play a musical instrument at a later age, but it's definitely possible to learn and play well into late adulthood," Bugos says.

Moreover, as a cognitive intervention to help aging adults preserve, and even build, skills, musical training holds real promise. "Musical training seems to have a beneficial impact at whatever age you start. It contains all the components of a cognitive training program that sometimes are overlooked, and just as we work out our bodies, we should work out our minds."

Sure, your friends might laugh when you sit down at the piano, but your brain may well have the last laugh.

Source: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/814540

More Evidence That Music Benefits the Brain Megan Brooks November 18, 2013

SAN DIEGO, California — A trio of new studies shows that musical training affects the structure and function of different regions of the brain, how those regions communicate during the creation of music, and how the brain processes different sensory stimuli.

These insights point to potential new roles for musical training, including fostering brain plasticity, providing an alternative educational tool, and treating learning disabilities, researchers say.

The studies were presented here at Neuroscience 2013, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

"Playing a musical instrument is a multisensory and motor experience that creates emotions and motions — from finger tapping to dancing — and engages pleasure and reward systems in the brain. It has the potential to change brain function and structure when done over a long period of time," Gottfried Schlaug, MD, PhD, from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston, Massachusetts), an expert on music, neuroimaging, and brain plasticity, said in a conference statement.

These new findings show that "intense musical training generates new processes within the brain, at different stages of life, and with a range of impacts on creativity, cognition, and learning," said Dr. Schlaug, who moderated a press conference where the research was discussed.

Start Music Lessons Early In one study, researchers found that musical training at a young age may strengthen the brain, especially regions that influence language skills and executive function.

Yunxin Wang, from the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University in China, and colleagues investigated the effects of music training on brain structure in 48 Han Chinese adults aged 19 to 21 years. All of them had had formal musical training for at least a year, beginning sometime between age 3 and 15.

After controlling for relevant cofactors, they found that the volume of brain regions related to hearing and self-awareness appeared to be larger in those who began taking music lessons before age 7. This hints that early musical training could potentially be used as a therapeutic tool, they say.

"Early musical training does more good for kids than just making it easier for them to enjoy music; it changes their brain and these brain changes could lead to cognitive advances as well. Our study provides evidence that early music training could change the structure of the brain's cortex," Wang noted in a conference statement.

"There is a lot of research showing that musical training has various cognitive benefits, such as better working memory, pitch discrimination performance, and selective attention," Wang told Medscape Medical News.

"In our study we didn't include any behavioral data but as we found that onset age of musical training was correlated with brain structural changes in regions related to several cognitive functions, such as language production (lingual gyrus) and auditory ability (superior temporal gyrus), it might be possible that some specified musical training could be applied to education in the future," Wang said.

The study was supported by the China's Ministry of Education and National Natural Science Foundation.

A study published earlier this month showed that childhood music lessons have neural benefit decades later.

As reported by Medscape Medical News, the researchers found that older adults who took music lessons as children but haven't actively played an instrument in decades have a faster brain response to a speech sound than individuals who never played an instrument.

Music Training Influences Multiple Senses A second study presented at Neuroscience 2013 hints that musical training improves the ability of the nervous system to integrate information from multiple senses.

"Implications of these results are clearly in the rehabilitation field," Julie Roy, graduate student in speech pathology and audiology at the University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, told Medscape Medical News.

Prior research on the sensory impact of musical training has focused on audiovisual processing, she explained.

Her study, she said, suggests a broader role for musical training in improving the ability of the nervous system to integrate information from all senses.

To gauge how musical training may affect multisensory processing, the researchers administered 2 tasks that simultaneously engage the sense of touch and hearing to a group of highly trained musicians and a group of nonmusicians.

Test results showed that musicians and nonmusicians had identical capabilities to detect and discriminate information based on a single sense, but the musicians were better able to separate auditory and tactile information. This finding suggests that long-term musical training influences multisensory processing, the researchers say.

"By finding that even though using different modalities and nonmusical stimuli, musicians still seem to have enhanced multisensory processing, we are one big step further down the road in affirming that musicians have overall enhanced multisensory processing," Roy told Medscape Medical News.

"We live in a multisensory environment where auditory and tactile information are processed together to give us the perception of the world as we know it. Knowing that musical training can indeed enhance this processing is of crucial importance when speaking about people with disability in one or both of those modalities, but even with people recovering from a stroke, for example, or diagnosed with a degenerating disease, or again, simply aging," she noted.

The study was supported by the Quebec Health Research Fund and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Musical Improv Strengthens Brain Circuits A third study presented at the conference sheds light on the neural basis of musical creativity. The researchers used functional MRI to study neural correlates of musical improvisation in 39 professional pianists with varying degrees of improvisational training.

Ana Pinho, MS, from the Karolinksa Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues found that experienced improvisers showed increased functional connectivity with other motor, premotor, and prefrontal regions, after adjustment for age and general piano playing.

"The findings support that improvisation training has specific effects on neural networks involved in musical creativity. Extensive experience with improvisation is associated with lower levels of activity in frontal and parietal association areas, regions which are central for cognitive control, working memory, and explicit response selection, suggesting that generation of meaningful musical materials can be more automated or performed with less attentional effort," they explain in a meeting abstract.

"This study raises interesting questions for future research, including how and to what extent creative behaviors can be learned and automated," Pinho added in a statement.

The study was supported by the Swedish Research Council, Sven and Dagmar Salén Foundation, and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

Neuroscience 2013. Abstracts 550.13, 122.13, and 767.07. Presented November 11, 2013.

Source: http://www.childrensmusicworkshop.com/advocacy/wwnm.html

Why We Need Music In Our Hearts

A Statement by John J. Mahlmann, Executive Director, MENC “Music of the Heart,” the Miramax film is based on the real-life story of Roberta Guaspari, a woman who started and maintained—as she maintains to this day— a music performance program for kids in East Harlem.

The plot highlights the teacher’s strength and spirit in overcoming adversity, the friendships that helped her accomplish her goal, and the way that the kids and community benefit from her efforts.

All of which makes for a great movie. But the part that really interests me, as the director of an association of more than seventy thousand music teachers, is the fact that she meets her goals and touches the lives of children through music.

Now I suspect that most viewers will find this eminently believable. Most parents can reflect on their kid’s experiences in school— or think back to their own school years—and conclude that many, many children stay engaged in school and rise to new heights as students because of involvement in the music program. Students are drawn into the unique mix of group identity and personal accomplishment offered by the experience of playing music with others in an ensemble. And they soon learn something of the nature of work as they strive to make the group sound better and be better by the collective and individual efforts of each musician—a learning process that they carry over into their other studies.

This result of music study—the development of a deep sense of community accomplishment based on personal effort— comes out beautifully in Streep’s portrayal of the music teacher in the movie. It’s a believable portrayal because parents and students seem almost universally to grasp this result of music study and to expect it from their music teachers and music programs in their schools.

But can parents universally expect that their local school has an adequate music program? The answer is more nearly “yes” now than it was five or ten years ago because of two factors: first, our current national prosperity has meant fuller funding for schools in general, and second, the establishment of national standards for music education and the development of similar standards in most states has forced music teachers and everyone else in the educational establishment to reconsider any ill- conceived notion that music study can be marginalized And the standards have come just in time for a new wave of expectations by parents. Parents now have higher expectations, based on a growing body of research that shows that music study will help children grow and achieve success in many ways —in society, in school, in developing intelligence, and in life. There are enough solid results from this research (though, to be sure, some results of the earliest studies in the field continue to be debated) that parents are on firm ground when they add these expectations to their arguments calling for a well-planned music curriculum.

But though the picture for music education for kids is rosier now than in the recent past, we are not yet at the point where parents can expect an adequate music program in every school. True, our strong economy has allowed most school districts to feel capable of funding music programs —but too often, problems in the local picture outweigh the national trend. Too often, local decision-makers are faced with hard choices regarding time and funding for various academic programs—and too often, the music program suffers. Too often, schools and school districts with low levels of achievement are faced with making these hard decisions —and too often, the children that could most use the discipline and engagement brought by music study are the ones to be denied the opportunity.

“Music of the Heart” shows what can happen when a school gives kids the opportunity to study music. I hope that everyone who sees the movie comes to understand the importance of music in our schools and our communities and spreads the word about why music is so essential to us all. And then, we need to work together to support music programs, keeping the benefits of music in mind when making decisions as parents, as taxpayers, and as citizens.

If it can be done in most of the country in the midst of prosperity—and if it can be done in East Harlem in the context of an economically struggling community—we can ensure that it is done everywhere in our nation. For all our children. www.menc.org for information on how to help support music education.

Source: http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/lerch1/edpsy/mozart_effect.html

The Mozart Effect: A Closer Look Donna Lerch EDPSY399OL Dr. Thomas Anderson UIUC Spring 2000 Introduction We are living in an exciting time of exploration into the most mysterious and complex object known to man: the brain. Recently created technological procedures such as positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging now allow researchers to study the working brain in great detail. This research is rapidly increasing our understanding of various mental disorders and disabilities, of the neurological basis for behavior, of memory and learning -- of quite literally how we think.

As early as 1989, Congress noted the enormous rate at which scientific information on the brain was amassing. The sophistication of computer science which had become sufficient to process neuroscience data, maximizing usefulness to both researchers and clinicians, and the advances in math, physics, and brain imaging, led them to declare the last decade of the twenty-first century "The Decade of the Brain."

Changes in the attitudes of the scientific community have also added to this expanding collection of knowledge: For nearly a century, the science of the mind (psychology) developed independently from the science of the brain (neuroscience). Psychologists were interested in our mental functions and capacities -- how we learn, remember, and think. Neuroscientists were interested in how the brain develops and functions. It was as if psychologists were interested only in our mental software and neuroscientists only in our neural hardware. Deeply held theoretical assumptions in both fields supported a view that mind and brain could, and indeed should, be studied independently. It is only in the past 15 years or so that these theoretical barriers have fallen. Now scientists called cognitive neuroscientists are beginning to study how our neural hardware might run our mental software, how brain structures support mental functions, how our neural circuits enable us to think and learn. This is an exciting and new scientific endeavor, but it is also a very young one. As a result we know relatively little about learning, thinking, and remembering at the level of brain areas, neural circuits, or synapses; we know very little about how the brain thinks, remembers, and learns. John T. Bruer One area that has generated much interest in the scientific and business communities, as well as the media, is the role (or roles) that music plays in the processes of thought and learning. There is an ever building volume of research suggesting that music may actually hard wire the brain, building links between the two hemispheres that can thereafter be utilized for a variety of cognitive activities. The effect of learning to play music is thought to be strongest in early childhood, but there may be a connection between merely listening to music and improved intelligence throughout maturity. I chose to research one aspect of this theory, and found an amazing abundance of both serious and pseudo/commercial scientific literature.

The Mozart Effect® People interested in easy ways to boost the IQs of themselves and their children, along with entrepreneurs whose apparent motivation centered on easy profits, eagerly embraced a recently released pop psychology book by Don Campbell called "The Mozart Effect : Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind and Unlock the Creative Spirit" .

Campbell based his book loosely on: • • •

The works of Dr. Alfred Tomatis, a French Ear, Nose, and Throat Doctor that hypothesized the lack of sound stimulation, or abnormal stimulation in utero and/or early childhood can cause aberrant behaviors and delayed or disabling communication skills Common music therapy experimentation The title topic, which I have chosen to scrutinize: research specifically involving the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

While the proposition that listening to Mozart's music increases I.Q. might actually have some merit, the benefits that Campbell promotes are overstated and generally unfounded. Michael Linton, professor of Music Theory and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University wryly observed, "Trademarking the name "Mozart Effect," Campbell has even gone cable with infomercials for his book and its accompanying compact discs and cassettes. In the great tradition of P. T. Barnum and the "Veg-O-Matic", Mozart has now hit the mainstream of American life."

Indeed, the book, along with subsequent speaking engagements, CDs, tapes, and a well orchestrated media blitz, has created the impression that listening to the music of Mozart will magically "increase verbal, emotional and spatial intelligence, improve concentration and memory, enhance right-brain creative

processes and strengthen intuitive thinking skills", as the promotion for one of the many Mozart Effect CDs promises.

While Campbell's book and the unfortunate mass of commercially motivated hyperbole it has generated are generally aimed at an unsophisticated audience, there is serious research that suggests that music does have a impact on cognitive ability.

The Mozart Effect Studies Early experimentation on the effect of music on the brain was conducted in 1988, when neurobiologist Gordon Shaw, along with graduate student Xiaodan Leng, first attempted to model brain activity on a computer at the University of California at Irvine . They found in simulations that the way nerve cells were connected to one another predisposed groups of cells to adopt certain specific firing patterns and rhythms.

Shaw surmises that these patterns form the basic exchange of mental activity. Inquisitively, they decided to turn the output of their simulations into sounds instead of a conventional printout. To their surprise, the rhythmic patterns sounded somewhat familiar, with some of the characteristics of baroque, new age, or Eastern music.

Shaw hypothesized: If brain activity can sound like music, might it be possible to begin to understand the neural activity by working in reverse and observing how the brain responds to music? Might patterns in music somehow stimulate the brain by activating similar firing patterns of nerve clusters?

He later joined two other researchers, Frances Rauscher and Katherine Ky, in creating the study that coined the term "Mozart Effect". In the October 14, 1993, issue of "Nature" they published a short summary of the findings from their experiment. They assigned thirty six Cal-Irvine students to one of three groups, and offered the same "pretest" to each of the students. One group then listened to a selection by Mozart (Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, K488). A second group listened to what was called a "relaxation tape," and the third group was subjected to ten minutes of silence. All of the students were given the same test, which was designed to measure spatial IQ. This test is described as mentally unfolding a piece of paper is that has been folded over several times and then cut. The object is to correctly select the final unfolded paper shape from five examples. The students who listened to the Mozart sonata averaged an 8&endash;9 point increase in their IQ as compared to the average of the students who had listened to the relaxation tape or who had experienced silence. The increase in IQ of the Mozart group was transitory, lasting only about the time it took to take the test-- from ten to fifteen minutes.

This test stirred enough interest in the academic community to induce several other research teams to conduct similar experiments, with disparate results.

In 1994, Stough, Kerkin, Bates, and Mangan, at the University of Aukland, failed to produce any Mozart effect. This may be due in part to the fact that the spatial IQ test used in New Zealand was from Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, while the Rauscher et al. study used the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.

However, Kenealy and Monseth (1994) did use the same test (Stanford-Binet) to measure the thirty subjects they used in their study; these subjects showed no mean differences in scores after listening to Mozart, disco music, and silence.

Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky reproduced and augmented their original Mozart Effect experiment in 1995, by dividing seventy-nine students into three groups. This time a work by the modern experimental composer Philip Glass was substituted for the relaxation tape. Again, the group that listened to the Mozart selection showed an increase in spatial IQ test scores. A further test showed that listening to other types of music (nonspecified "dance" musis) did not have the same effect.

In 1995, researchers (Newman, Rosenbach, Burns, Latimer, Matocha, and Vogt) at State University of New York at Albany replicated the original test. They broadened the test group to 114 subjects, and the age spread from 18 to 51 years with a mean age of 27.3. Not only did they find no similar increase in spatial IQ scores after listening to Mozart, but they also polled the subjects on previous musical background, and found no correlation to higher spatial IQ scores and music lessons earlier in life, or a correlation to higher spatial IQ scores and a preference for classical music.

Similar results were found the same year in a study by two Canadian University researchers, Nantais and Schellenberg. They reproduced the fundamental Mozart Effect experiment, and extended the study to investigate the relationship between listening to other forms of music and IQ. They found that the listener's preference--to either music or the narration of a story, and not particularly listening to Mozart, made for improved test performance.

In 1996 and 1997, however, two studies at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, by Rideout and Taylor supported and added further evidence to suggest a "Mozart effect". One study replicated the Rauscher et al. study and, using two different spatial-reasoning tasks, measured higher spatial IQ scores after listening to a Mozart selection. In the other study, Rideout and Laubach required 8 college students to listen to a Mozart piano sonata in one condition and no music in another condition. They measured changes in EEG ( brain wave activity) prior to listening to the Mozart and then again after listening to the Mozart while engaged in two spatial-reasoning tasks. The EEG recordings were somewhat correlated with the students' performance, as increased brain activity was associated with an increase in spatial-reasoning performance after listening to the Mozart.

In 1998, Rideout, this time with Dougherty and Wernert, found that music with characteristics similar to the works of Mozart provided the same increase in temporary spatial IQ test scores.

Two other studies, both published in 1997, contradicted the "Mozart effect". Kenneth Steele, Ball, and Runk of Appalachian State University presented 36 college students a backwards digit span task, described as recalling 9-digit strings in reverse order, in three conditions--after listening to Mozart music, a recording of rain, or silence. The results found no difference between these three conditions. Carlson, Rama, Artchakov, and Linnankoski of the Institute of Biomedicine affiliated with University of Helsinki, Finland, chose monkeys to see if any "Mozart effect" would show up in another animal. He used a memory task to test various experimental conditions including Mozart music, simple rhythms, white noise, and silence. The results were intriguing. The monkeys actually performed highest in the white noise condition and lowest in the Mozart music condition.

Perhaps inspired by the Carlson et al. test using monkeys, Rauscher and her colleagues chose to study the "Mozart effect" on laboratory rats in 1998. These rats were exposed both in utero and for two months postpartum to Mozart's piano sonata. The other comparison groups included rats that were exposed in the same time frame to minimalist music, white noise, or silence. The rats who were exposed in the Mozart group learned to maneuver a T-maze considerably faster and with fewer errors than rats in the other three groups.

Christopher Chabris, in 1998 a graduate student at Harvard University (now a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital), questioned the net result of studies on the Mozart effect that had been done over the previous five years. He examined sixteen of the studies and analyzed their conclusions. "The results do not show any real change in I.Q. or reasoning ability. There's a very small enhancement in learning a specific task, such as visualizing the result of folding and cutting paper, but even that is not statistically significant. The improvement is smaller than the average variation of a single person's I.Q. test performance." His conclusion was that "There's nothing wrong with having young people listen to classical music, but it's not going to make them smarter."

Other skeptics have been convinced that a Mozart effect does exist. Lois Hetland of the Harvard Graduate School of Education attempted to replicate earlier Mozart effect studies in broader depth, including a total of 1014 subjects. Her findings were that the Mozart listening group outperformed other groups by a higher margin than could be explained by chance, although factors such as the subject's gender, musical tastes and training, innate spatial ability, and cultural background made a difference in the degree to which the Mozart would increase test scores. She did not find the Mozart effect to be as strong as Rauscher et al. had found, however. Her belief, however, is that even these small effects are impressive because so many other factors could obscure them. "In the early stages of research in a field, we would expect the measured effect to be small until we learn to separate the signal from the noise in the research method." She noted that Chabris had only studied the experiments that compared listening to Mozart to silence, and which had not included listening to other compositions.

Psychologist Eric Seigel at Elmhurst College, Illinois, (who had been a self-described skeptic), set out to disprove the Mozart Effect. He chose a different spatial reasoning test, one that involves the subject's ability to discriminate between shifted positions of the letter E as various rotations are given. The brief time that it takes to judge whether the letter is the same or different effectively measures spatial reasoning. Subjects in the Mozart listening group did significantly better. "It was as though they had practiced the test...we have another way to measure the Mozart Effect" says Seigel.

Rauscher and Shaw explained the inconsistent results of the Mozart effect tests in a work published in Perception and Motor Skills (1998) , Vol. 86, p. 835-841). They stated that the reason the results do not concur is that the various studies designed to find the "Mozart effect" have utilized diverse subjects and different methodological designs, such as music compositions, listening conditions, and measures.

The most recent Mozart effect study was by Kenneth Steele of Appalachian State University, this time with Karen Bass and Melissa Crook in 1999. They chose to precisely replicate the 1995 Rauscher et al. with the rationale that "the comparison was methodologically cleaner than the 1993 study published in Nature" (Steele).

The results: The experiment compared the performance of 44 college students who had just listened to the Mozart piano sonata against 39 students who had just listened to a performance by Phillip Glass and 42 students who had waited an equivalent time period in silence. The two musical selections used the same performances used in the 1995 study. Immediately after exposure to a listening condition, all subjects were tested on their ability to solve paper-folding and cutting items, the task used in both original experiments. A paper-folding and cutting item is a visual puzzle that represents a piece of paper undergoing a series of fold and cut transformations on the top row of a display. On the bottom row are several possible outcomes of this folding and cutting sequence. The task for the subject is to pick the outcome that would be produced by the changes in the top row. The subjects had training with this task in a prior session, consistent with the procedure used in the 1995 UCI study. On average, the students answered 10 of 16 items correctly in the training session and 12 of 16 items correctly in the experimental session, on average. This general improvement from the training session is a "practice" effect, reflecting familiarity with the task and indicating the

importance of evaluating changes against comparison or "control" conditions. The average number of correct answers in the experimental session was 11.77 for the Mozart group, 11.6 for the Silence group, and 12.15 for the Glass group. These small differences were not statistically different, failing to support the original experiment. An additional statistical technique that checked for differences in individual improvement also produced non-significant results. Gary Kliewer Steele seems to have taken offense at Rauscher's defensive stance of her research, saying, "There has been considerable concern about the existence of the Mozart Effect among researchers, despite its popular acceptance by politicians and educators. Several immediate attempts in other laboratories in England, New Zealand, and the United States to produce the effect were fruitless...Replication is one of the most important items in the scientist's toolbox. This experiment took investigators back to a common starting place, the UCI experiments, and the results showed that the effect was not present. This experiment, in combination with several others, suggests strongly that the original positive reports were in error."

What sense can be made of all this conflicting information?

One ought not to be concerned about the current lack of consensus, because this is a normal part of the scientific enterprise. Rather, we should be delighted that the subject has become important, because it has been largely ignored in the past. We can look forward to exciting developments in the search to fully understand the roles of music in cognitive processes and behavior. N. M. Weinberger Scientific Explanations for the Mozart Effect While no definitive results have yet been attained, scientists who are gaining knowledge of the neurological wirings and workings of the brain, as well as those trained in the science of the mind and behavior, are slowly beginning to develop theories as to why music might have an effect on intelligence.

Neurological Basis Rauscher et al. hypothesized that the effect of music on intelligence may be explained by the initial research

by Shaw and Leng that proposed hearing complex music actually excites the cortical firing patterns that are analogous to those used in spatial reasoning.

"The researchers were testing the suspicion that there might be a kind of "music box" analogous to Chomsky's famous yet-undiscovered "language box." Might the symmetries and patterns characteristic of music be fundamentally connected to the symmetries and patterns researchers were tracking in brain waves? If so, might not music really be tapping into a structure inherent in the brain itself? And if this were true, ultimately might music be a kind of fundamental, or pre-linguistic--or even supralinguistic--speech?" Michael Linton Musical perception is processed in the right hemisphere of the brain--the same hemisphere that performs spatial cogitation and long-term sequencing operations. "Musical perception does involve the analysis of spatial excitation patterns along the auditory receptor organ.." (Roederer) Other researchers agree that there are neurological foundations for music's effects on cognitive ability. John Hughes, a neurologist at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago, examined hundreds of compositions and concludes that music sequences that regularly repeat every 20 - 30 seconds, just as Mozart's compositions do prevalently, "may trigger the strongest response in the brain, because many functions of the central nervous system such as the onset of sleep and brain wave patterns also occur in 30-second cycles." He notes that Minimalist music by the composer Philip Glass and popular tunes score among the lowest on this measure, while music of Mozart scores two to three times higher.

Hughes used Mozart's music on a group of patients described as severely epileptic, constantly seizing to the point of being comatose. Twenty-nine out of the 36 subjects showed significant improvement by suffering fewer and less severe seizures when listening to Mozart. The same test group showed no improvement while they listened to a Glass composition, popular melodies from the 1930's, or silence. "Skeptics could criticize the IQ studies," Hughes says, "but this is on paper: you can count discharges and watch them decrease during the Mozart music."

Julene Johnson of the Institute of Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California at Irvine found that people that suffer from Alzheimer's disease show improvement on the paper folding portion (measuring spatial IQ) of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale after 10-minute portions of Mozart, but not after silence or popular music from the 1930s. Patient's scores generally improved by a margin of 3 to 4 correct answers out of 8 test items.

Neurobiologist Gordon Shaw, co-researcher of the original Mozart effect joined fellow neurobiologist Mark Bodner of the University of California at Los Angeles in a study using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to chart the regions of subjects' brains to determine the specific area that responds while listening to various types of music. They used the Mozart Sonata in D major for Two Pianos K488, some '30s pop music, and Beethoven's F端r Elise. Shaw and Bodner found that all the styles of music activated the auditory cortex (where the brain processes sound) and periodically triggered the parts of the brain that are associated with emotion. Only the Mozart, though, also activated areas of the brain known to process fine motor

coordination, vision, and other higher thought processes, all of which could explain improved spatial reasoning.

Christopher Chabris, the skeptic who steadfastly maintains that a Mozart effect does not exist observes, "this effect, if indeed there is one, is much more readily explained by established principles of neuropsychology--in this case, an effect on mood or arousal--than by some new model about columnar organization of neurons and neuron firing patterns".

Psychological Basis Nantais and Schellenberg also have a alternate theory, based from a psychologist's perspective: On the surface, the Mozart effect is similar to robust psychological phenomena such as transfer or priming. For example, the effect could be considered an instance of positive, nonspecific transfer across domains and modalities (i.e., music listening and visual-spatial performance) that do not have a well-documented association. Transfer is said to occur when knowledge or skill acquired in one situation influences performance in another (Postman, 1971). In the case of the Mozart effect, however, passive listening to music-rather than overt learning--influences spatial-temporal performance. Kristin M. Nantais and E. Glenn Schellenberg Maria Spychiger of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland concurs with this theory. She asked an incisive question. "‌why does no one even ask ‌ whether maths can improve the mind? Or whether language could?

Probably, these questions are too silly or strange; everyone knows the answer is 'yes'."

Spychiger conducted a study which showed that children given a curriculum which increased music education and decreased language and mathematics improved at language and reading, and did no worse at math than students who had increased time on these "academic" subjects without the additional music instruction.

Spychiger theorized that the transfer effects between music and other subjects was probably specific and based on the similarities between the two activities, just as are many other known transfer effects.

Thus, instead of speaking about "music's" effects, one needs to determine which aspects of music account for which transfer effects. This position heralds the theme that the effects of music cannot be understood unless one specifies which components of the musical experience may be relevant to specific aspects of other tasks or areas. An example is music's facilitation of learning to read. This is believed to result from learning to listen for changes in pitch in music, which is thought to promote the ability to sound out new words. Norman M. Weinberger Sensory Stimulation Another explanation for increased test scores after listening to music would be the established theory of sensory stimulation. Stimulation excites the brain. It propagates more synapses between brain cells, ultimately creating more and more efficient conduits of brain function. Research indicates that there are "windows" of prime times for this activity. Most of the studies conducted so far demonstrate that much of this hard wiring occurs prenatally and in early childhood. However, new studies are ever increasingly discovering that the brain can create new neural pathways long after childhood.

When the brain is deprived of proper stimulation, it is believed that the neural pathways atrophy and ultimately are lost. Robert Dolman. M.D., founder of the National Academy for Child Development, stated,"Sensory deprivation studies show us that sudden and nearly complete deprivation of stimulation through the five senses can lead to dramatic changes in the brain's efficiency with a partial loss of memory, a lowering of the I.Q., and personality changes..." G. F. Reed, after analyzing studies of the cognitive effects of sensory deprivation, adds documentation. He found that subjects tested lower on most parts of tests of complex intellectual processes after periods of sensory deprivation, noting that "..logical, analytical thought, based on verbal symbols, deteriorates at the same time that there is more involuntary imagery in various sensory modalities, particularly the visual....stimulus deprivation appears to increase the kind of information processing (such as) intuitive, configurational procedures at the expense of analysis, language, and logic."

Music is aural stimulation. The "successful" Mozart effect studies at best indicated that one area of cognitive processing increased only for a very short time, after listening to music for a short period of time. However, this does lead to speculation that listening to certain types of music will facilitate and improve mental function. Many people express an increased ability to concentrate when certain background music is played.

Karen Allen, associate director, and Jim Blascovich, associate professor of psychology research associate with the University of Buffalo, NY Center for the Study of Biobehavioral and Social Aspects of Health found that surgeons performed a basic surgeon-related task better and more efficiently while listening to music.

Conclusion The music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is both physically and aesthetically accessible to the general public. A number of studies have indicated that listening to Mozart's work may temporarily increase cognitive skills.

Other studies have found no statistically significant "Mozart effect". It is unfortunate that the media and commercial ventures have taken the initial modest, unverified study and conjured up a pseudo-science which gave rise to, and which continues to promote, a full-blown industry.

Exaggerated and even false claims that listening to Mozart's music will augment intelligence have become so prevalent that the truth of the matter has become hopelessly obscured. This has been a disservice to legitimate scientists, music therapists, and the public.

Music educators should be aware of the controversy, and neither center music curricula around certain types of music for maximum intelligence building, nor exclude the possibility that there may be a link between listening to music and intelligence. There needs to be further serious research into this intriguing area of science, and far less unsubstantiated, profit motivated action.

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Radocy, Rudolf. (no date given) Arts and Education Featured Guests: Dr. Frances H. Rauscher [Online] Available: http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/nb/guests/Rauscher1.html [2000, May 5] McCullough, Andrea K. (1997) When is Music Used to Change Mood. [Online] Available: http://www.mwsc.edu/~psych/research/psy302/spring97/andrea_mccullough.html [2000, May 5] Stough, C.K., Kerkin, B. Bates, T.C. and Mangan, G.L. (1994) Music and IQ tests. The Psychologist, 7:253.

Newman, J., Rosenbach, J., Burns., K. Latimer B., Motocha, H., and Rosenthal Vogt, K. (1995) An Experimental Test of "The Mozart Effect": Does Listening to his Music Improve Spatial Ability? Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1995, 81, 1379-1387 Available: http://hobbes.uvm.edu/lies4thedition/Classfolder/MozartEffect/Newman.html [2000, May 5] Nantais, K. and Scellenberg, E.G. (1995) The Mozart Effect: An Artifact of Preference [Online] Available:http://hobbes.uvm.edu/lies4thedition/Classfolder/MozartEffect/Nantais.html [2000, May 5] Example of Raven's Progressive Matrices [Online] Available: http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/97articles/ncap3.html [2000, May 5] Rauscher, F., Shaw G. Ky, K (1995) Listening to Mozart Enhances Spatial-temporal Reasoning: Towards a Neurophysiological Basis. Neuroscience Letters, Vol: 185, Issue: 1, February 6, 1995 pp. 44-47 Kliewer, Gary (1999) The Mozart Effect. New Scientist [Online] November 6, 1999 Available: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991106/themozarte.html [2000, May 5] (No Author Given) (1999) The "Mozart effect": Is There Truly an Effect? [Online] Society for Auditory Intervention Techniques Website Available:http://www.teleport.com/~sait/mozart.html [2000, May 5] Azar, Beth (1996) Musical Studies Provide Clues to Brain Functions [Online] American Psychological Association Monitor, April 1996 Available: http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr96/neural.html

Carlson S, Rama P, Artchakov D, Linnankoski I (1997) Effects of Music and White Noise on Working Memory Performance in Monkeys. Neuroreport 1997 Sep 8;8(13):2853-6 Abstract available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Entrez/query?uid=9376518&form=6&db=m&Dopt=b [2000, May 5] Snell, J.L., Peterson, B., Grinstead, C. Hou, F. and Snell,J. Mozart Sonata's IQ Impact: Eine Kleine Oversold?

[Online] CHANCE News 8.08 August 18, 1999 to October 6, 1999 Available:http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/chance_news/recent_news/chance_news_8.08.html [2000, May 5] Steele, K. M., Bass, K. E., & Crook, M. D. (1999). The mystery of the Mozart effect: Failure to replicate.

Psychological Science, 10, 366-369. July 10, 1999 (vol. 10, pages 366-369) Weinberger, Norman.(1995) Does Listening to Mozart Affect Spatial IQ? [Online] The Music and Science Information Computer Archive Volume II, Issue 2, Fall 1995 Available: http://www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/V2I2F95.html#mozart [2000, May 5] Weinberger, Norman.(1999) Can Music Really Improve the Mind? The Question of Transfer Effects.[Online] The Music and Science Information Computer Archive Volume VI, Issue 2, Spring 1999 Available: http://www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/V6I2S99.html#improve [2000, May 5] Weinberger, Norman.(2000) The Mozart Effect [Online] The Music and Science Information Computer Archive Volume VII, Issue 1, Winter 2000 Available: http://musica.uci.edu/mrn/V7I1W00.html Mozart Effect [2000, May 5] Linton, M. (1999) The Mozart Effect. [Online] First Things First 91 (March 1999): 10-13. Available: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9903/linton.html [2000, May 5] Roederer, Juan G. (1994) The Physics and Psychophysics of Music (pg 13 & 53) Springer-Verlag 1995 Hughes, John. (1998) The "Mozart effect" on Epileptiform Activity. Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol 86, p 835 (1998) Johnson JK, Cotman CW, Tasaki CS, Shaw GL. Enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning after Mozart listening condition in Alzheimer's disease: a case study. Neuro. Res. 1998; 20: 666.

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Source: http://www.parentingscience.com/music-and-intelligence.html

Music and intelligence: A parent's evidence-based guide © 2008-2014 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Music and intelligence: Why music training, not passive listening, is the focus of recent interest Everybody’s heard of the Mozart effect, the notion that you can increase your intelligence by listening to Mozart’s music.

Experiments have reported that people enjoyed brief improvements in their visual-spatial skills immediately after listening to a Mozart sonata (Rauscher et al 1993; Hetland 2000).

However, the results have been inconsistent, with some labs failing replicate the effect. It's also unclear if it was really the music that was responsible for the temporary enhancement of intelligence.

It's plausible that people improved their performance because listening to music elevated their mood and left them feeling more alert (Schellenberg 2005).

And whatever the cause, there's no evidence that passive listening can make you smarter in the long-term.

But what about taking an active role? Research indicates that music lessons change the course of brain development and -- just possibly -- influence children's success in other, non-musical tasks.

Music and intelligence: How musical training shapes the brain Brain scanning technologies have permitted neuroscientists to observe the activity of living brains, and the results are clear: Musicians are different.

For instance, in one study, people who played musical instruments as children showed more robust brainstem responses to sound than did non-musicians (Skoe and Kraus 2012).

Other studies have reported that kids assigned to receive musical training developed distinctive neural responses to music and speech, evidence of more intense information processing that was linked with improvements in the discrimination of pitch and the segmentation of speech (Moreno et al 2009; Chobert et al 2012; François et al 2012).

And it's not just a matter of differences in brain activity. There are also differences in brain volume.

If you examine the brain of a keyboard player, you’ll find that the region of the brain that controls finger movements is enlarged (Pascual-Leone 2001).

Moreover, brain scans of 9- to 11-year old children have revealed that those kids who play musical instruments have significantly more grey matter volume in both the sensorimotor cortex and the occipital lobes (Schlaug et al 2005).

In fact, musicians have significantly more grey matter in several brain regions (Schlaug et al 2005), and the effects of music lessons seem to increase with the intensity of training.

One study compared professional keyboard players with amateurs. Although both groups had music training, the professionals practiced twice as much. The professionals also had significantly more grey matter volume in a number of brain regions (Gaser and Schlaug 2003).

In the genes?

It's not simply a case of genetics—-i.e., that people with more grey matter volume are more likely to become musicians. Research suggests that the brains of non-musicians change in response to musical training.

In one study, non-musicians were assigned to perform a 5-finger exercise on the piano for two hours a day.

Within five days, subjects showed evidence of re-wiring. The size of the area associated with finger movements had become larger and more active (Pascual-Leone 2001) So it's reasonable to think that the brain grows in response to music training. Are these brain differences linked with differences in intelligence?

Maybe so.

Correlational studies have reported a number of advantages for musically-trained children, ranging from better verbal and mathematical skills to higher scores on tests of working memory, cognitive flexibility, and IQ (Fujioka et al 2006; Schellenberg 2006; Patel and Iverson 2007; Hanna-Pladdy and Mackay 2011).

But correlations don't prove causation, and there is reason to doubt that music training is responsible for these advantages.

Maybe parents with greater cognitive ability are more likely to enroll their kids in music lessons. Or maybe kids with higher ability are more likely to seek out and stick with music lessons because they find music training more rewarding (Schellenberg 2006). Either way, this could explain the correlation between music training and cognitive outcomes.

So the crucial question is this: How can we rule out the idea that the link between music and intelligence is entirely determined by prior ability? What's needed are controlled experiments, randomly assigning kids with no prior music training to receive lessons.

Several studies have pursued this approach, and the results have been mixed.

Does music training causes improvements in non-musical intellectual ability?

Mixed evidence One study randomly assigned 4-year-olds to receive either weekly keyboard lessons or a control condition for 6-8 months. The kids who received music training performed better on a test of spatial skills (Rauscher et al 1997).

Another experiment randomly assigned 6-year-olds to receive one of four treatments during the school year: •

Keyboard lessons

•

Vocal lessons

•

Drama lessons

•

No lessons

By the end of the school year, all participants experienced a small increase in IQ. However, the kids who received music lessons showed significantly more improvement than the other groups did (Schellenberg 2004).

More recently, researchers reported that 8-year-old children showed enhanced reading and pitch discrimination abilities in speech after 6 months of musical training. Kids in a control group (who took painting lessons instead) experienced no such improvements (Moreno et al 2009).

These outcomes support the idea that musical training causes modest improvements in non-musical cognitive ability. But other studies have failed to replicate the results.

In one of the longest-running experimental studies ever conducted on music and intelligence in children, Eugenia Costa-Giomi found no apparent effects in grade-school students after 3 years of piano instruction (Costa-Giomi 1999).

And in 2013, Samuel A. Mehr and his colleagues published the results of a six-week intervention on preschoolers. At the study's end, the researchers tested children for improvements in four areas--spatialnavigational reasoning, visual form analysis, numerical discrimination, and receptive vocabulary. Kids who'd experienced music training performed no better than kids assigned to classes in visual arts (Mehr et al 2013).

Where does this leave us?

A priori, it's not unreasonable to think that serious music training might hone skills of relevance to nonmusical cognition.

For instance, students of music are required to •

focus attention for long periods of time

•

decode a complex symbolic system (musical notation)

•

translate the code into precise motor patterns

•

recognize patterns of sound across time

•

discriminate differences in pitch

•

learn rules of pattern formation

•

memorize long passages of music

•

track and reproduce rhythms

•

understand ratios and fractions (e.g., a quarter note is half as long as a half note)

•

improvise within a set of musical rules

If children improve these skills, they might find their improvements transfer to other domains, like language and mathematics (Schellenberg 2005; Shlaug et al 2005).

But as E. Glenn Schellenberg has argued (2006), we need more research tracking long-term outcomes.

One such study is being conducted by Gottfried Schlaug and his colleagues at the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.

These researchers are tracking the effects of music lessons--specifically, piano and violin lessons--on brain development and cognition.

Fifty kids, aged 5 to 7 years, began the study with no prior music training. Before starting music lessons, these kids were given brain scans and cognitive tests to establish baselines. Researchers are also following a control group, matched for age, socioeconomic status and verbal IQ. Fifteen months into the study, the musically-trained kids showed greater improvement in finger motor skills and auditory discrimination skills.

Although there were no other behavioral differences between groups, the musicians also showed structural brain differences in •

regions linked with motor and auditory processing, and

•

"various frontal areas, the left posterior peri-cingulate and a left middle occipital region."

The trained kids were expected to show differences in motor and auditory processing centers. The other changes were unexpected (Hyde et al 2009), but may relate to the brain's need to integrate information from various modalities (visual, motor, auditory, et cetera).

Schlaug and colleagues will to track these kids for many years. For more information about their continuing research on music and intelligence, check out their website.

And click here to read about an experimental study that suggests 20 days of music training -- when combined with training for better executive function -- can enhance a child's self-control and verbal intelligence (Moreno et al 2011).

Music and intelligence: The bottom line Nobody rules out the idea that genes may be responsible for much of the IQ advantage enjoyed by musicians.

But it seems clear that music training causes changes in the brain, and that serious students of music hone a variety of skills that could be relevant in other contexts.

Given evidence that certain games can enhance self-regulation and working memory, and even help dyslexic children learn to read, the notion that music training has transferable effects isn't all that far-fetched. In the next few years, we may have definitive evidence on this point.

Meanwhile? I think there's good reason to offer music lessons to children in primary school. Cognitive benefits aside, we shouldn’t overlook the obvious: Music lessons are intrinsically rewarding. When kids learn to play a musical instrument, they are laying the groundwork for a lifetime’s appreciation of music, and all the satisfaction that brings.

Resources You can help fuel your child's interest by sharing the world's best music with him. I've found a website, Classic Cat, where you can do this for free.

It's a catalog of over 4800 classical performances (many of them complete) that can be downloaded free and legally.

Best of all, the site is indexed by composer, performer, genres, and even instruments. So if your child wants to know what an oboe sounds like, you can quickly find and download Mozart's Quartet and Oboe for Strings in F major.

References: Music and intelligence Chobert J, François C, Velay JL, and Besson M. 2012. Twelve Months of Active Musical Training in 8- to 10Year-Old Children Enhances the Preattentive Processing of Syllabic Duration and Voice Onset Time. Cereb Cortex. 2012 Dec 12. [Epub ahead of print] Costa-Giomi E. 1999. The effects of three years of piano instruction on children’s cognitive development.

Journal of research in music education 47: 198-212.

François C, Chobert J, Besson M, and Schön D. 2012. Music Training for the Development of Speech Segmentation. Cereb Cortex. 2012 Jul 10. [Epub ahead of print] Fujioka T, Ross B, Kakigi R, Pantev C, and Trainor LJ. 2006. One year of musical training affects development of auditory cortical-evoked fields in young children. Brain. 129(Pt 10):2593-608 Gaser C and Schlaug G. 2003. Brain structures differ between musicians and nonmusicians. Journal of Neuroscience 23: 9240-9245.

Hanna-Pladdy B, Mackay A. 2011. The relation between instrumental musical activity and cognitive aging.

Neuropsychology. 2011 Apr 4. [Epub ahead of print] Hetland L. 2000. Listening to music enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: Evidence for the "Mozart effect."

The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34(3/4): 105--148.

Hyde KL, Lerch J, Norton A, Forgeard M, Winner E, Evans AC, Schlaug G. 2009. The effects of musical training on structural brain development: a longitudinal study. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1169:182-6.

Mehr SA, Schachner A, Katz RC, Spelke ES. 2013. Two randomized trials provide no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment. PLoS One. 8(12):e82007.

Moreno S, Marques C, Santos A, Santos M, Castro SL, and Besson M. 2009. Musical training influences linguistic abilities in 8-year-old children: more evidence for brain plasticity. Cereb Cortex. 19(3):712-23.

Moreno, S., Bialystok, E., Barac, R., Schellenberg, E. G., Cepeda, N. J., & Chau, T. 2011. Short-term music training enhances verbal intelligence and executive function. Psychological Science. Epub 2011 Oct 3.

Pascual-Leone A. 2001. The Brain That Plays Music and Is Changed by It. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 930 (1): 315–329.

Patel AD and Iversen JR. 2007. The linguistic benefits of musical abilities. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11:369-372.

Rauscher FH, Shaw GL and Ky, KN. 1993. Music and spatial task performance. Nature 365: 611.

Rauscher FH, Shaw GL, Levine, LJ, Wright EL, Dennis WR, and Newcomb RL. 1997. Music training causes longterm enhancements of preschool children’s spatial-temporal reasoning. Neurological Research 19: 2-8.

Rauscher FH. 2002. Mozart and the mind: Factual and fictional effects of musical enrichment. In J Aronson (ed), Improving academic achievement: Impact of psychological factors in education, pp. 267-278. San Diego: Academic Press.

Schellenberg EG. 2004. Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological Science 15(8) 511-514.

Schellenberg EG. 2005. Long-term positive associations between music lessons and IQ. Journal of Educational Psychology 98(2): 457-468.

Schellenberg EG. 2006. Long-term positive associations between music lessons and IQ. Journal of Educational Psychology 98(2): 457-468.

Schellenberg EG. 2011. Examining the association between music lessons and intelligence. Br J Psychol.

102(3):283-302.

Schlaug G, Norton A, Overy K and Winner E. 2005. Effects of music training on the child’s brain and cognitive development. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1060: 219-230.

Skoe E and Kraus N. 2012. A little goes a long way: how the adult brain is shaped by musical training in childhood. J Neurosci. 32(34):11507-10.

Content of "Music and intelligence" last modified 3/14