Growing up, I looked forward to
Tuesday afternoons all week. In my elementary school’s music room the
possibilities of activities and lessons we would learn were endless. Leading up
to Tuesday, I tried to imagine what my music teacher, Mrs. Reiner, had in store
for us. From playing “Hot Cross Buns” on the amateur recorder to sitting in a
large drum circle feeling and creating the vibrations of ancient African beats,
I always knew something exciting was in store for me once I entered that
classroom. Unfortunately my external expression of music was short lived; my
middle school choir director admitted that I had a complete lack of rhythm. As
if that wasn’t enough, teasing remarks from my family about how they praised
the lord the day I gave up playing the violin, solidified that fact that music
was not my forte. However, I never lost my desire for the euphoric sensation
music brought me. I now satisfy my thirst for music by frequenting concert
halls and having my headphones permanently attached. In Guitar Zero, Gary Marcus mentality about his lack of talent
differed from mine when he embarked on a mission to fulfill a life long dream
of learning to successfully play guitar.
Guitar Zero discusses the challenges of
learning to play an instrument especially for an adult. He discourages the
notion that talent is everything and argues for the extreme importance of
practice. Marcus becomes his own lab rat by attempting to learn the guitar and
sets out to prove that it is possible for an adult to acquire new knowledge. The reoccurring theme throughout Guitar Zero is the struggle to rewire
his brain so that it fosters the necessary connections to be a musician. The
brain must reallocate space in the primary motor cortex in order to increase
the amount of dexterity and sensitivity body regions essential to playing the
guitar have. For example, in order to increase the ability to accurately
perform finger positions the region assigned finger sensitivity needs to be
larger than say the region devoted to the back of the neck.
In article Brain Connectivity Predicts Reading Skills,
a study published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences revealed a strong correlation to the growth of
long-range connections in the brain and future reading success among children between
7 and 12 years old. The study followed these children’s success in learning to
read for the duration of three years. Thirty-nine of the fifty-five children
who participated in the study received brain scans tracing the growth of two
major white-matter tracts. While a child grows up the brain is partaking in
synaptic pruning where rarely used synapse are eliminated and replaced. This
process of pruning is what dedicates the growth of white-matter tracts. Along with pruning, the myelination or
encasing of tracts by fatty fibers increases the speed of communication and
subsequently the growth of white-matter. In Brain
Connectivity Predicts Reading Skills, the brain scans revealed two distinct
growth patterns of long-range white-matter connections. Some children started
with a weak signal of white-matter tracts on the left side of the brain, which
gradually strengthened over the three years and resulted in strong reading
ability. The other group of children had the opposite findings. In the strong
readers brain the development of myelination and pruning was occurring
simultaneously while in the poor readers brain it occurred separately (Mo
Costandi).
Throughout adolescences a child’s
brain is undergoing subtle changes similar to the changes Marcus’ brain underwent
during his year of learning to play the guitar. The adult and adolescent brain
slowly eliminated synapses that were unnecessary for everyday processes. In
order to learn a new task whether playing the guitar or learning to read the
brain needed to literally make new pathways and allocate new areas to handle
the task at hand.
Guitar
Zero illustrates that it is possible to learn a new trick but experience
and a particular teaching style is necessary. Marcus explains that in order for
an adult to learn to play an instrument or a foreign language they must break
the content into small pieces so that chunking allows for greater success. A
student must also dedicate a lot of time and effort into the task because
practice matters. He also attributes his success at learning to play to
dedicated teachers who are motivating, patient, and able to point out mistakes.
Guitar Zero exemplifies the extreme
importance of the environment and type of teaching students experience. In Brain Connectivity Predicts Reading Skills it
would be beneficial for these children’s teachers to apply the knowledge that
different processes of brain mapping require different plans of when a
particular skill should be learned.
Works
Cited
Costandi/Nature Magazine, Mo.
"Brain Connectivity Predicts Reading Skills:
Scientific
American." Brain Connectivity Predicts Reading Skills: Scientific
American. Scientific American, 9 Oct. 2012. Web. 11 Oct. 2012.
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-connectivity-predicts-reading-skills>.
Marcus, Gary F. Guitar Zero:
The New Musician and the Science of Learning. New York: Penguin, 2012.
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