Recent neurological scientific experiments confirm what music educators have known all along: music lessons increase brain power. This is especially true -and critical - for young children as a musically rich environment early on improves life skills and opportunities later. But the benefits of music study don’t end when youth does: no matter what the student’s age, music can improve quality of life by stimulating and challenging the brain to learn new things. Not just a right-brain/left-brain activity, music engages all parts of the brain at the same time and as a result builds pathways and strengthens connections overall.
We should not fail to mention the primary benefit of music: personal enrichment through the joy of creating, participating, sharing and achieving in a broader, community minded context.
Some Recent Brain Science About Music
Harris, M. (July 23, 2010). Learning instruments boosts kids’ brains. The Vancouver Province, p. 33.
Clip from W-Five’s “The Musical Brain.”
Excerpt from Hodges, D. (1999). Does music really make you smarter? Southwestern Musician, 67:9, 28-33:
[First:] One answer to the question—“Does music really make you smarter?—should be a resounding “NO.” That is, certainly music does not make one smarter in any superficial sense. Here is a quick, informal test of logic that might help. Imagine going to any university campus and organizing the faculty into disciplines. Would it be reasonable to assume that the music faculty is smarter than the astrophysicists, the biochemists, the philosophers, or any other faculty group simply because they had heard more Mozart?…
[However] what is most important, then, is not so much how many brain cells one has but the number of interconnections among brain cells. Children raised in an impoverished sensory environment make a paucity of synaptic connections, while those raised in a rich sensory environment make many more. If we were to look at the brain of a child who had been stimulated with many different sights, sounds, smells, textures, and so on, we would see a dense thicket of neuronal interconnections. Note again that music is not the only, nor necessarily even the most important, sensory input. Nevertheless, early childhood musical experiences in the form of lullabies, musical crib mobiles, and other similar experiences can aid in the development of the neural networks necessary for later music processing….
Furthermore, this area of the brain [the auditory cortex] on the left side is larger among those with absolute pitch and those who started serious musical studies before the age of seven….
In general, these data support the notion that music is represented in the brains of trained musicians by widely-distributed, but locally specialized neural networks. Music is not processed simplistically in a single “music center,” nor is it only a “right-brained” activity; activations were found scattered throughout many brain regions. Melody, harmony, and rhythm are processed in complex neural pathways that are dissociated from each other and from other behavioural asks (e.g., language). These variations in location of activation suggest that the different regions or subareas perform different functions for different tasks. Also, a region in the right hemisphere (the fusiform gyrus) was activated for music reading that paralleled an area in the left hemisphere that becomes activated during language reading….
In sum, brain research indicates that music learning experiences change brain organization and brain processing. Trained musicians’ brains are organized differently and operate differently than untrained musicians’ brains.