photo: woodley wonderworks via flickr
DCL
It's pretty much conventional wisdom at this point that listening to certain types of music (classical in particular, but anything on the more complex side of composition should do the trick) can help with learning. A new study in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience adds some nuance to that however, showing that musical training not only helps children learn language and speech better, but also has positive effects on memory, attention span, and vocal emotion.
Reviewing multiple studies on the intersection of music training and learning, researchers from Northwestern University found that an active engagement with musical sounds enhances neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to adapt and change to new experiences—and "enables the nervous system to provide the stable scaffolding of meaningful patterns so important to learning."
Professor Nina Kraus, lead author author of the article, says playing an instrument primes the brain to choose what is relevant in complex situations:
"A musician's brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound. In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean."
These skills apply to many aspects of life:
The Nature article reviews literature showing, for example, that musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words. Children who are musically trained show stronger neural activation to pitch changes in speech and have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training.
And musicians trained to hear sounds embedded in a rich network of melodies and harmonies are primed to understand speech in a noisy background. They exhibit both enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities that give them a distinct advantage for processing speech in challenging listening environments compared with non-musicians. (Science Daily)
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