Rx For Learning And The Brain: Music; The Duke of Uke Demonstrates & Nina Kraus Explains
July 23, 2010
Nothing attests to the hunger for music more than the ubiquitous sight of thin white wires draped like jewelry from ears and plugged into devices, playing who knows what: Bach? Beyonce? Bieber?
Noticing the other day how many riders on the subway were wired up, I mused that it was no wonder Dr. Rudolfo Llinás, a giant of modern neuroscience, speaks of the the life of cells in the brain as looking “like a Riverdance perfomance,” with “some cells tapping in harmony and some … silent, creating myriads of patterns that represent the properties of the external world. Cells with the same rhythm form circuits to bind information in time.”
Nor does it surprise that an explosion of studies in recent years has suggested that music on the brain is a good thing, good for learning and longevity. Consider this disparate group of musicians and their current ages: BB King, 84; Earl Scrugg, 86, Ravi Shankar, 90, ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, 95; and Pinetop Perkins, 96; or the world’s oldest performing musician, Bill Tapia, the Duke of the Uke, 102, who appeared recently at the New York Uke Festival.
Now a data-driven review has pulled together studies linking musical training to learning, from skills ranging from language to memory. And scientists who published their work this week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience say that collectively the research has significant implications for education.
Playing an instrument, the researchers say, primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians.
“The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant,” Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature perspective, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
“A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound,” Kraus said. “In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean.” The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication, she said.
Musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words, according to literature gathered in the Nature review. 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.
Children with learning disorders are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise, according to the article. “Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise.”
Their review, Northwestern researchers conclude, argues for serious investing of resources in music training in schools accompanied with rigorous examinations of the effects of such instruction on listening, learning, memory, attention and literacy skills.
(Part of this post was adapted from materials provided by by Northwestern University.)