All of us want to have well functioning brains for ourselves and possibly even more so for our children. One way to ensure a well connected brain could be through early introduction to musical instruments or possibly taking up an instrument later in life as a hobby. Scientists have been looking into the connection between musical practice and brain function for a long time. One such article makes the argument for music to be in education as per the benefits correlated to music exposure and practice (Kraus and White-Schwoch, 2020). There are links to higher graduation rates and overall better success in education when one is involved in music education. You may find yourself asking: Why is music correlated to general education measures and what are the boundaries to this phenomenon? You certainly wouldn’t be alone.
The general idea is that “music lessons accelerate brain development, but only after some time” (Kraus and White-Schwoch, 2020). This hypothesis is based on our brains’ plasticity being improved by music lessons and therefore contributing to overall more effective learning in other areas. It has been found that those with musical training have a significant increase in neural sound processing as found in Kraus et al., 2014 (Kraus and White-Schwoch, 2020). Similar benefits have been connected to musical training including executive function (Clayton et al., 2016), visual attention (Clayton et al., 2016), and general brain connectedness (Leipold et., 2021).
A study done by Gaser and Sclaug in 2003 was able to show that male professional as well as male non-professional musicians had differences in their brain structures compared to non-musician males (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). This study was done only with male participants as sex has been found to have an affect on brain structures. The main findings were that musicians, professional or not, had larger gray matter volumes in regions involved with motor, auditory, and visual processing. It is easy to see how play a musical instrument would require use of all of those areas, it is impressive to see that it also improves processing in those areas over time which allows for a transfer of skill that was found in following studies (Kraus and White-Schwoch, 2020; Clayton et al., 2016).
It has been thought that only professional musicians or those with absolute or perfect pitch would have such differences in their brain structures and connectivity, but this change in structure and connectivity is happening to those without absolute pitch or being professional musicians (Leipold et al., 2021; Kraus and White-Schwoch, 2020). In Leipold’s research, they were able to find that musicians had a significantly stronger functional connectivity in the auditory regions in both hemispheres of the brain. Furthermore, they found that “musicians also had stronger white matter connections between auditory regions and lobes involved in various types of high-level processing: (Leipold et al., 2021). These differences were more pronounced with an earlier age of on-set for musical training. Meaning the sooner one starts musical training, the more your brain can grow functional connections throughout your brain. Looking into this field gives one a new appreciation for their music classes in elementary and middle school and possibly a desire to pick up an old instrument again.
References:
Clayton, K. K., Swaminathan, J., Yazdanbakhsh, A., Zuk, J., Patel, A. D., & Kidd, G. (2016). Executive Function, Visual Attention and the Cocktail Party Problem in Musicians and Non-Musicians. PLOS ONE, 11(7). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157638
Gaser, C., & Schlaug, G. (2003). Brain Structures Differ Between Musicians and Non-Musicians. The Journal of Neuroscience, 23(27), 9240–9245. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.23-27-09240.2003
Kraus, N., & White-Schwoch, T. (2020). The Argument for Music Education. American Scientist, 108(4), 210. https://doi.org/10.1511/2020.108.4.210
Leipold, S., Klein, C., & Jäncke, L. (2021). Musical Expertise Shapes Functional and Structural Brain Networks Independent of Absolute Pitch Ability. The Journal of Neuroscience, 41(11), 2496–2511. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.1985-20.2020
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