Education Week - December 4, 2013 - 6

Studies Highlight Brain Benefits From Music Training
Early lessons yielded
strongest effects
By Sarah D. Sparks
San Diego
At the Youth Orchestra Los An-
geles, a student sits poised with
her bow at a practiced angle to her
violin, her eyes following both the
written notation in front of her and
the conductor's direction, aware
of both her own music and the
sounds coming from fellow students'
instruments.
New research suggests that the
complexity involved in practicing
and performing music may help
students' cognitive development.
Studies released last month at the
Society for Neuroscience meeting
here find that music training may
increase the neural connections in
regions of the brain associated with
creativity, decisionmaking, and
complex memory, and they may improve
a student's ability to process
conflicting information from many
senses at once. Research also found
that starting music education early
can be even more helpful.
"It's really hard to come up with
an experience similar to that" as an
education intervention, said Gottfried
Schlaug, the director of the
Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory
at Harvard Medical School. Not
only does it require attention and
coordination of multiple senses, but
it often triggers emotions, involves
cooperation with other people, and
provides immediate feedback to the
student on progress, he said. Music,
on its own, has also been shown to
trigger the reward area of the brain,
he noted.
Learning to Multitask
For example, a team of researchers
led by Julie Roy, a postgraduate
researcher at the auditory-neuroscience-research
library at the
University of Montreal in Canada,
tested 15 musicians with 10 to
25 years of experience, as well as
15 nonmusicians of the same age,
in sensory-processing tasks. The
participants were asked to report
touch sensations while also hearing
sounds, ignoring what they heard,
and reporting only what they felt on
a finger. Prior research has shown
that to be difficult to do; normally,
those who feel one touch but hear
two sounds will think they have felt
two touches.
Longtime musicians, however,
who must simultaneously read
music, feel their instrument, and
respond to the sounds it produces,
were more than twice as accurate at
distinguishing touch and hearing.
In another study, Yunxin Wang, a
researcher at the State Key Laboratory
of Cognitive Neuroscience
and Learning at Beijing Normal
University in China, examined the
structures of the brains of 48 young
adults ages 19 to 21 who had studied
music at least one year between
the ages of 3 and 15. After controlling
for gender and the amount of
discipline and commitment," Ms.
Shorts said. "They get to communicate
emotion without words."
As students take part in intense,
group-based musical training over
those years-two hours a day, five
days a week-the USC researchers
are tracking their cognitive, socialemotional,
and physiological brain
development, and comparing it to
that of matched students who do
not receive musical training but
participate in sports activities at an
equal intensity. At the same time,
the study is analyzing the development
of the students' musical skills
and creativity over time.
"Several studies have provided
compelling evidence that when the
brains of adult musicians are compared
to nonmusicians there are
differences of function and anatomy,"
said Assal Habibi, a USC postdoctoral
researcher on the study.
"Longitudinal studies in children
are the only way to examine the
relative contributions of nature and
nurture to the differences found in
adult populations."
time they had trained overall, Ms.
Yunxin found those who had begun
musical training before age 7 had
significantly more-developed brain
areas associated with language and
executive function.
Ana Pinho, a neuroscientist at the
Karolinska Institute in Stockholm,
Sweden, argued that musical education
can be helpful at any age. "Even
after stroke and disease, starting
musical training can still help you
get more from your brain," she said.
"All of these findings show [musical
training] can create a lot of plasticity
that can produce effectiveness across
the brain, in cognition and behavior."
Ms. Pinho used functional mag-
netic resonance imaging to record
the blood flow in the frontal lobes of
39 pianists while they improvised
music on a specially designed keyboard.
Musicians with longer experience
in improvising music had
better and more targeted activity in
the regions of the brain associated
with creativity and the ability to
transfer working memory to longterm
memory.
While specific parts of the brain
can be responsible for a motor task
such as strumming a G-string, researchers
are finding that a musician
interpreting Johann Sebastian
Bach's "Air on a G String,"-much
less creating such a masterpiece-
uses more of a brainwide process.
"We say that when people are inspired,
they create, that it all comes
in a rush," said Antonio R. Damasio,
a neuroscience professor at the University
of Southern California, "but,
of course, it comes in a rush if you've
trained your hands and your mind
for an entire lifetime. That moment
of inspiration generally comes on
the back of a whole process of imagination
and knowledge and criticism
of what has come before.
"We want to know what circuitries
are involved, but this is something
about the whole brain, not left or
right brain or some particular cortex,"
he said during a symposium
about the neuroscience of creativity
6 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 4, 2013 | www.edweek.org
at the conference Nov. 8-14.
Mr. Damasio leads an ongoing longitudinal
study by USC's Brain and
Creativity Institute on the development
of musical skills-and neurological
development-of students in
the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles.
For the past year, the project has
worked with the youth orchestra,
which provides free musical instruments
and training to low-income
students in the city. Researchers
are tracking students for five years,
beginning at ages 6 or 7, who have
been matched in age, socioeconomic
status, and prior cognitive ability.
Different Focus
Nikki Z. Shorts, the lead strings
teacher and conductor of the Heart
of Los Angeles site of the orchestra,
said she has seen one band of sometimes
rambunctious 1st graders develop
into attentive 4th graders in
the three years she has taught them.
"In order to cultivate the skills to
sit and focus, they're like athletes:
We exercise our brains and our bodies,
and then we have to take a break,
relax, and come back to it. And over
time, that skill builds up," she said.
Moreover, the nonacademic setting
can give students who have
behavioral problems in school "a different
way to focus on the skills of
FROM TOP: A 9-year-old student
at Youth Orchestra Los Angeles,
or YOLA, holds her bow at the
ready during a beginning class.
Researchers are tracking
students from the program to
learn how the training affects
their cognitive development.
Another student plays the flute
in a YOLA class. Studies suggest
early music training may
strengthen a wide range of
thinking skills.
"
Creativity Toolbox
And insights to the ways music affects
brain development may help researchers
understand how students
process other cognitively complex
tasks, Mr. Schlaug said. For example,
he has found that "musical disorders,"
such as tone-deafness or the inability
to distinguish and hold a beat, affect
4 percent to 10 percent of the population-the
same percentages that
have been identified with primary
disabilities in other areas, such as
dyslexia in reading or dyscalculia
in mathematics. Moreover, a 2011
study by Mr. Schaug and his colleagues
found among children ages 7
to 9, the ability to perceive pitch and
phonemic awareness were correlated,
suggesting there may be a connection
or a shared neural cause of both dyslexia
and tone-deafness.
"Having this toolbox of ways to
examine creativity allows us to understand
what brain regions are involved
in creative thought and coming
up with new ideas," Harvard's
Mr. Schlaug said. "From a broader
societal perspective, it is obviously
important to strengthen creativity
because that is the seed for coming
up with new developments, new
ideas, and new tools."
All of these findings
show [musical
training] can create
a lot of plasticity
that can produce
effectiveness across
the brain. ..."
ANA PINHO
Karolinska Institute
Does this mean states should set
mandatory music-training requirements,
as nearly all now do for physical
education?
Probably not, according to Mr.
Schaug. While studies show benefits
of music training, so far they have
only looked at students who are
voluntarily participating, not those
who are forced to play.
"You wouldn't want to do an activity
that wouldn't be joyful and rewarding
for anybody to do," he said.
Coverage of leadership, expanded
learning time, and arts learning
is supported in part by a grant
from The Wallace Foundation,
at www.wallacefoundation.org.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.
Photos by Eric Grigorian for Education Week
http://www.wallacefoundation.org http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - December 4, 2013

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