Motor: Brain areas that control instrument-related muscles and body parts (such as the fingers, the mouth, etc.) grow in size. People can detect smaller differences in frequency (the number of sound waves per second), making both speech and music easier to hear. Here are some of the important things that happen in the brain when we play music (for review, see Zatorre ):Īuditory: The auditory system processes sound more effectively after musical training. The science tells us that music is so much more than just a source of entertainment it is an important part of our lifetime of learning. The specialization includes not only increased size of each brain area, but also the way each area functions. Research with these machines, as well as studying the brains of people who have died, shows that auditory (hearing), visual (sight), and motor (movement) areas of the brain are specialized in expert musicians. Scientists measure neural plasticity with special brain-imaging techniques, like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or electroencephalogram (EEG), to find out exactly how playing music changes the way our brains work.
The process of changing the brain through our experiences is called neural plasticity, because the brain is easily shaped, like plastic. Just like your muscles, your brain gets stronger the more you exercise it. Therefore, the focusing power of music could be amplified by playing along. This is much the same as the way that playing sports will improve your physical condition more than simply watching sports. Further, just listening to music may have a different, or perhaps smaller, effect than actually playing music. This means that, while music in your home or classroom would not automatically improve your performance, it could be useful to help you to focus on a new task or in situations when increased attention and decreased stress are necessary. Subsequent studies showed that listening to music does not actually make you smarter, but rather raises your level of enjoyment and decreases your feelings of stress, which sometimes result in better focus and improved test scores. But this was an oversimplification and an overstatement of the results. This led people to believe that listening to music makes you smarter. They showed that people’s scores on IQ tests improved when they listened to classical music by Mozart. While not everyone is a master of the violin, everyone is a master of their own communication style.Īt first, some scientists thought that the brain could benefit just by listening to music. It is not a musical performance, but a musical aspect of communication. Think of the different ways that you might say “huh.” Each of those ways communicates something different. In addition to music being an art form, any form of communication is partly musical and can be said to have musicality. At the same time, music can convey profound emotions that would be difficult to describe in words. Think how difficult it would be to say something relatively simple like, “your left shoe is untied,” using only melody and rhythm. This means that music does not use words to explain things. Unlike speech, however, music is not generally considered semantic. Because of this, we can only define music in a general way, as a form of communication through sound. What is music and why do people think it is important for learning? While people of every culture around the world make something that could be called music, not so many of them give it a name or think of it as separate from other activities, like dance or storytelling. In this article, we explore research on learning and music to help us understand why music promotes brain development and how music can be a central part of our lives, in and out of the classroom. Whenever you communicate without words (the way you say something instead of what you say) you are engaging in musical behavior. You do not have to be a Mozart to get the brain benefit of playing music, because music is so accessible and is more than just songs. In this article, we highlight how various brain functions, including hearing, sight, movement, and social awareness, are impacted by music training. Playing music gives the brain a multisensory “workout” that can strengthen memory, help us pay attention, and perhaps even improve reading ability. What is music and why do people think it is important for learning? Musical sounds fill our lives: from the music you share online to the songs playing in shops and restaurants, we are rarely far from music.
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