Several times a week, a group of at-risk youth in Los Angeles reports to makeshift music rooms at Alexandria Elementary School near Koreatown for lessons in violin or cello or bass—and to Saturday ensemble programs where they learn to play with bands and orchestras. As the students study their instruments, researchers study the students’ brains.
The children, who devote at least five hours per week to their music, are participants in the award-winning non-profit Harmony Project, which provides free instruments and instruction to kids in underserved areas of the city if they promise to stay in school. The scientists, who hail from Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, travel from Evanston, Illinois to a satellite lab in Hollywood for a few weeks each year to examine the impact of the music lessons on the children’s language and cognitive skills. What they are finding, according to Dr. Nina Kraus, a professor and neuroscientist at Northwestern and lead researcher of the study, is that music instruction not only improves children’s communication skills, attention, and memory, but that it may even close the academic gap between rich and poor students. Kraus reported these results in a National Endowment of the Arts-sponsored webinar in July.
When Plato said that music gives “wings to the mind,” he might have been onto something. Recent studies increasingly point to the power of music to shape the brain and boost its functioning. But despite a flurry of research documenting the positive effects of music lessons on the brain, there have been few controlled, longitudinal studies like Kraus’s that follow kids year after year and examine music’s impact on brain structure and function as it’s happening. Instead, most of the studies to date have compared the brains of musicians and non-musicians—or of students who have studied instruments to those who have not—and inferred that brain enhancements in music-makers stem from music training
Kraus’s study is part of a new wave of longer-term, forward-looking studies honing in on the neurological impact of school and community-based music training—as opposed to private music lessons, which, according to Kraus, have been the basis of most past studies—particularly on lower-income students who have not previously had access to music education, so study subjects begin on a level playing field. Kraus and her colleagues in Los Angeles will spend the next few years gauging not only how group music instruction affects the way the brain processes sound, but also how it influences classroom and language skills among the elementary school kids enrolled in the Harmony project. Kraus is also evaluating the impact of public school-based music instruction on adolescent brain development in a multi-year study focusing on inner-city high school students in Chicago.
Meanwhile, another five-year study
at the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute
is tracking cognitive, emotional, and social development in at-risk
elementary school children in the gang-riddled Rampart District of Los
Angeles who receive high-intensity music training through the Youth
Orchestra Los Angeles program.
And
in yet another ongoing five-year study, neuroscientists at the
University of California, San Diego are watching to see how intense
music ensemble training affects the brain development of children in San
Diego’s under-served Chula Vista school district, specifically by
looking at how it influences connections in the brain. “We clearly
believe that if someone becomes better at language perception, something
in the brain has changed,” says John Iversen, Ph.D., a cognitive
neuroscientist at UCSD and lead researcher of the SIMPHONY (Studying the Influence Music Practice has On Neurodevelopment in Youth) project. “By tracking the same kids for a series of years, we can watch the whole process unfold.”
Though these
studies are far from over, researchers, as well as the parents and
teachers of the study subjects, are already noticing a change in the
kids who are studying music. Preliminary results suggest that not only
does school and community-based music instruction indeed have an impact
on brain functioning, but that it could possibly make a significant
difference in the academic trajectory of lower-income kids.
Unfortunately, these are the kids who typically have less access to quality music education programs. Though a 2012 U.S. Department of Education report
found that some degree of music education was offered in the majority
of public schools—94 percent of elementary schools and 91 percent of
secondary schools—it also revealed an alarming disparity between the
availability of music programs in high-poverty and low-poverty schools.
The new crop of controlled, multi-year studies promises to further
scientists’ understanding of how music training affects the brain, and
in so doing, perhaps provide an impetus for social change.
***
Much fanfare followed studies in the 1990’s suggesting that exposure to classical music makes the brain work better, improving spatial reasoning
as well as concentration. Not only did retailers capitalize on these
findings with classical music CDs and videos designed to make babies
smarter, but the governor of Georgia at the time, Zell Miller, cited the
so-called “Mozart Effect” as his justification for including a $105,000 item in his 1998 state budget
to provide a classical music CD to every infant born in Georgia. While
most scientists agree that these initial findings were overplayed (and
temporary), subsequent studies have shown that active music training has
an even more profound—and longer lasting—effect than just being exposed
to music.
“Not
only does music instruction improve communication skills and create a
brain and nervous system that is more attuned to sound, which is
important for both music and language," says Kraus, “but music can
fundamentally alter the nervous system to create better learners.”
What's more, adds Kraus, is that early music experience will have a
positive effect on the adult brain whether you continue it or not. In
fact, a study by Kraus published last year by the Journal of Neuroscience,
found that childhood music lessons helped sharpen the brain’s response
to sound well into adulthood—even when adults no longer played an
instrument.
Thanks to
advances in brain imaging, research into music’s effects on the brain
has exploded in the past two decades. According to Dr. Aniruddh Patel,
associate professor of psychology at Tufts University and a
co-investigator with the SIMPHONY study, new neuroimaging tools give
scientists an unprecedented window into the brain. And while there is
evidence that listening to music has short-term effects on brain
physiology and emotion, making music appears to have lasting effects on
both brain structure and brain function.
Playing a piece
of music involves the auditory, visual, motor and emotional centers of
the brain. In fact, according to Dr. Norman Weinberger, research
professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California,
Irvine, brain scans reveal that there is more activity in the brain
during a musical performance than there is during most other activities.
Not only does
music-making activate many different regions of the brain, but it can
actually help to shape the brain itself. “We now know the brain is an
organ that changes with experience,” Patel says, “and music has an
impact on brain structure.” That impact appears to be strongest when
music training begins in early childhood, when the brain is developing
the most rapidly and multiple new connections are being formed.
According to Patel, children’s brains show evidence of faster
development when they are learning to play an instrument. And studies
comparing the brains of adult musicians and non-musicians find the most
pronounced enhancements in brain structure in those who began their
music training early in childhood. Musicians’ brains have increased grey
matter, which is involved in processing, as well as increased white
matter, which is comprised of the connective fibers that link disparate
parts of the brain. Several studies have also found that the musician’s
brain tends to have a larger corpus callosum, which plays an important role in the communication between the left and right sides of the brain.
“The fact that
music engages so much in the brain—including regions we think of as
important for language, memory, motor control, executive function and
emotion—raises the question of how it interacts with these other
activities,” says Patel. It’s not surprising, Patel says, to find that
violinists, who make intricate movements with the fingers on their left
hand, have enhanced fine motor function and corresponding changes in the
regions of the brain that govern left-handed finger control. What’s
more surprising is that music training actually enhances the way the
brain processes language.
By connecting
research subjects via scalp electrodes to machines that record the way
their brains respond to sound, Kraus and her colleagues at
Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Lab measure how the brain encodes
pitch, timing, and timbre, all three “key ingredients of music and
speech,” according to Kraus. Musicians process both sound and speech
more accurately and efficiently. “Not only are they better at encoding
what I said, but they are better at interpreting how I mean it,” says
Kraus “If my pitch goes up, I’m asking a question, if it goes down, I’m
making an emphatic statement, and all kinds of emotion is carried by
changes in pitch.”
Timing and
timbre are important in distinguishing between different consonants in
speech, like bill vs. pill, or cat vs. bat, something that a child must
be able to do in order to read successfully. In fact, Kraus and other
researchers have found that children who have better rhythm tend to be
better readers as well. And one of the most important cognitive
functions strengthened bymusic is auditory working memory, says
Kraus—you have to be able to remember the words you just read to
understand what comes next, just as a musician has to remember a note
that has just been played to tune an instrument or to improvise.
Musicians
are also better able to hear speech amidst other noise, a useful skill
for children who are trying to attend to what a teacher is saying in a
noisy classroom. “If you present speech in an environment with lots of
background noise, the musician’s brain is less affected by the addition
of the noise,” Kraus says. Interestingly, even adult musicians with
age-related hearing loss can detect speech in noise more accurately than
a non-musician without hearing loss, because their brains are more
adept at processing sound.
***
Early
testing of subjects in the Harmony Project study found improvement in
the students’ ability to hear speech in noise after just one year of
music training—an effect that was not noted in the control group, which
consists of equally motivated students on waitlists to get into music
classes. Even more striking is that second grade Harmony project
participants in Kraus’s study made grade-appropriate improvements in
their ability to read during their first year of music making while
matched controls attending the same schools did not. In fact, those who
had not studied music showed a decline in reading skills between second
and third grade, following a national trend in which the education gap
between rich and poor students widens over the first few years of
schooling. “Existing research indicates that kids from poor homes are
not learning to read in the first four years of school – while kids from
middle-class and affluent homes are,” says Dr. Margaret Martin, founder
of the Harmony Project. “Given the importance of reading in achieving
an education, this finding is stunning.”
Scientific data
in the SIMPHONY study, which recently completed its first year, is so
far limited to baseline assessments of rhythmic ability and brain
structure among participants, though Iversen, who presented early
results at a Society for Music Perception and Cognition conference this
summer, says researchers have noted a relationship between differences
in students’ rhythmic ability and differences in their brain structure.
But San Diego Youth Symphony’s Community Opus program,
which provides free after-school, on-site string instrument instruction
to students involved in the SIMPHONY study is three years old, and
Chula Vista school district officials have been so impressed with how
involvement with music is benefitting their students that they have
committed to hiring full-time music teachers for all 45 of the
district’s schools over the next 10 years. Music had been cut from
nearly all of Chula Vista’s schools over the past decade, but last
spring, the district reinstated school-day music classes for third
graders at six of its schools.
According to
Dalouge Smith, president and CEO of the San Diego Youth Symphony, not
only have principals at Community Opus participating schools reported a
decline in classroom disruptions and improved motivation, behavior, and
attendance among students studying instruments, but these students also
performed significantly better on fourth grade math and reading
proficiency tests than students not receiving music instruction.
Ironically, these findings come at a time when 1.3 million of the nation’s public elementary school students
receive no specific instruction in music—and the children who do not
have access to music education are disproportionately those who attend
high-poverty schools. While wealthier school districts can compensate
for budget cuts that reduce or eliminate music programs with private
funding, low-income school districts cannot, so the kids who might
benefit most from music education are often the least likely to get it.
“One certainly hopes,” Iversen says, “that the results of these kinds of
studies will cause a re-evaluation of the role of arts education in
schools.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rehearsing may change the way the brain develops, scientists suspect
The more years of practice during childhood, the faster the brain response was, the small study found.
The Journal of Neuroscience work looked at 44 people in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
The volunteers in the study listened to a synthesised speech syllable, "da", while researchers measured electrical activity in the region of the brain that processes sound information - the auditory brainstem.
Despite none of the study participants having played an instrument in nearly 40 years, those who completed between four and 14 years of music training early in life had a faster response to the speech sound than those who had never been taught music.
The study took place at the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois, US.
Lifelong skill As people grow older, they often experience changes in the brain that compromise hearing. For instance, the brains of older adults show a slower response to fast-changing sounds, which is important for interpreting speech.
It could be that learning an instrument in childhood causes a fixed change in the brain that is retained throughout life.
Or, music classes somehow prepare the brain for future auditory learning, say the researchers.
Past work by the same team found younger adults were better listeners if they had been taught an instrument as a child.
Experts also believe musical training - with an emphasis on rhythmic skills - can exercise the auditory-system.
But these studies are all relatively small and cannot ascertain if it is definitely musical training that is causing the effect.
Arguably, children offered the opportunity to learn an instrument, which can be expensive, may come from more privileged backgrounds and this may have an influence.
Commenting on the study, Michael Kilgard from the University of Texas, who was not involved with the research, said: "Being a millisecond faster may not seem like much, but the brain is very sensitive to timing and a millisecond compounded over millions of neurons can make a real difference in the lives of older adults."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24802433?SThisFB
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Childhood music lessons 'leave lasting brain boost'
Rehearsing may change the way the brain develops, scientists suspect
Learning a musical instrument as a child gives the brain a boost that lasts long into adult life, say scientists.
Adults who used to play an instrument, even if they have not
done so in decades, have a faster brain response to speech sounds,
research suggests. The more years of practice during childhood, the faster the brain response was, the small study found.
The Journal of Neuroscience work looked at 44 people in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
The volunteers in the study listened to a synthesised speech syllable, "da", while researchers measured electrical activity in the region of the brain that processes sound information - the auditory brainstem.
Despite none of the study participants having played an instrument in nearly 40 years, those who completed between four and 14 years of music training early in life had a faster response to the speech sound than those who had never been taught music.
The study took place at the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois, US.
Lifelong skill As people grow older, they often experience changes in the brain that compromise hearing. For instance, the brains of older adults show a slower response to fast-changing sounds, which is important for interpreting speech.
It could be that learning an instrument in childhood causes a fixed change in the brain that is retained throughout life.
Or, music classes somehow prepare the brain for future auditory learning, say the researchers.
Past work by the same team found younger adults were better listeners if they had been taught an instrument as a child.
Experts also believe musical training - with an emphasis on rhythmic skills - can exercise the auditory-system.
But these studies are all relatively small and cannot ascertain if it is definitely musical training that is causing the effect.
Arguably, children offered the opportunity to learn an instrument, which can be expensive, may come from more privileged backgrounds and this may have an influence.
Commenting on the study, Michael Kilgard from the University of Texas, who was not involved with the research, said: "Being a millisecond faster may not seem like much, but the brain is very sensitive to timing and a millisecond compounded over millions of neurons can make a real difference in the lives of older adults."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24802433?SThisFB
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