[pianotech] It's official: music rewires the brain (as if you didn't know)

[David Boyce]

Very interesting! It bears out something I heard on a radio news show 
some 20 years ago:

At a school in England, as an experiment, all the children who were 
considered "tone deaf" were given special music instraction and practice 
and formed into a choir over a period of months. They played before and 
after performances. Before, was just a collecetion of children singing 
random notes, horrible, and after, a very nice children's choir.

But the most interesting thing was that they found over the period of 
instruction that the children's LITERACY skills shot up, without any 
extra instruction in that area. The music instruction and practice, did 
something to the part of the brain that processes literacy.

Best regards,

David Boyce.


> Learning to play, he has found, is a far better bet. In a 2004 study, 
> he and his colleagues randomly assigned 144 6-year-olds to receive 
> instruction in keyboard, voice, drama or nothing. After a year, kids 
> who got keyboard or voice lessons showed a 3-point IQ boost on average 
> over the kids taking drama or no lessons at all.
>
> It's a modest improvement but one that may build on itself since, for 
> all its faults, IQ is a reliable predictor of a child's performance in 
> school. Better performance in school typically leads to more and 
> better schooling — which, in turn, further increases IQ.
>
> For those receiving musical instruction, "there is evidence that music 
> changes the brain in positive and permanent ways," says Laurel 
> Trainor, professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior, and 
> director of the auditory development lab of McMaster University in 
> Toronto. Yet like a medication that powerfully treats an illness, but 
> in mysterious ways, the means by which music might enhance cognitive 
> powers has eluded scientists so far.