Mr.

Bailey


What really happens in your brain - How to practice

How does the brain make a memory? It's an athletic process happening inside your head- take a look at what happens and how you can get the most out of your practice sessions.

"The Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at USC began the five-year study in 2012 in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) to examine the impact of music instruction on children’s social, emotional and cognitive development.

Thirteen of the children, at 6 or 7 years old, began to receive music instruction through the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program at HOLA. The scientists are comparing the budding musicians with peers in two other groups: 11 children in a community soccer program, and 13 children who are not involved in any specific after-school programs.

The neuroscientists are using several tools to monitor changes in them as they grow: MRI to monitor changes through brain scans, EEG to track electrical activity in the brains, behavioral testing and other such techniques.

Within two years of the study, the neuroscientists found the auditory systems of children in the music program were maturing faster in them than in the other children. The fine-tuning of their auditory pathway could accelerate their development of language and reading, as well as other abilities – a potential effect which the scientists are continuing to study.

The enhanced maturity reflects an increase in neuroplasticity – a physiological change in the brain in response to its environment – in this case, exposure to music and music instruction."

Cultivating musical ability early on has lifelong benefits

As research into neural pathways intensifies, musicians are being found to have structurally different brains than non musicians. The working hypothesis in the field is that the combination of motor movement, active listening, emotive thought, and observational skills all contribute to a musician building connection between areas of the brain that might not otherwise be connected. Functionally, this could mean that different areas of the brain can "talk" to each other more readily since there are connective pathways in place.

From the article:

WHETHER IT'S SINGING DO-RE-MI or strumming a guitar, making music is one of the best ways to stimulate a young mind." Even if children abandon their music lessons when they hit their angsty teen years, cognitive neuroscientists say cultivating musical ability early on has lifelong benefits. Playing music can help children read better, store memories, and pronounce different languages.

From the research report abstract:

Our results show robust effects of musicianship in inter- and intrahemispheric connectivity in both structural and functional networks. Crucially, most of the effects were replicable in both musicians with and without absolute pitch when compared to non-musicians. However, we did not find evidence for an effect of absolute pitch on intrinsic functional or structural connectivity in our data: The two musician groups showed strikingly similar networks across all analyses. Our results suggest that long-term musical training is associated with robust changes in large-scale brain networks.

Links to the article and research report abstract are below.

Learning an instrument can structurally change the brain — study.pdf
Musical expertise shapes functional and structural brain networks independent of absolute pitch ability _ Journal of Neuroscience.pdf

Music is often referred to as a "Universal Language". Thanks to neurological research (brain science!), we are starting to understand a little bit about why that is the case.

From the article:

Every culture enjoys music and song, and those songs serve many different purposes: accompanying a dance, soothing an infant, or expressing love. Now, after analyzing recordings from all around the world, researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 25 show that vocal songs sharing one of those many functions tend to sound similar to one another, no matter which culture they come from. As a result, people listening to those songs in any one of 60 countries could make accurate inferences about them, even after hearing only a quick 14-second sampling.

The research, backed by Harvard, was conducted by having a wide range of audiences listen to short segments of song, and label the emotional content of the song. Even when language was a barrier (you only speak french and the song is performed in mandarin chinese...), the emotional content of the song was communicated, ie: we all understand sadness in a song. Researchers stated that:

“Despite the staggering diversity of music influenced by countless cultures and readily available to the modern listener, our shared human nature may underlie basic musical structures that transcend cultural differences,” says Samuel Mehr (@samuelmehr) at Harvard University.

“We show that our shared psychology produces fundamental patterns in song that transcend our profound cultural differences,” adds co-first author of the study Manvir Singh, also at Harvard. “This suggests that our emotional and behavioral responses to aesthetic stimuli are remarkably similar across widely diverging populations.”


Maybe this helps explain why a piece like Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" makes me feel so happy, or how Chopin's "Prelude in E minor" for piano can connect so many people. Benjamin Zander highlights thee transformative power of classical music using the Chopin piece here -

Music-Matters-Final.pdf

The Arts Education Partnership report (Sept. 2011) shows how music enhances motor skills, fosters memory and thinking skills, advances math and English/Language arts (ELA) achievement, sharpens student attentiveness, strengthens perseverance, fosters creativity, and increases self-esteem.

How Music Changes Learning Opportunities

Champions-of-Change.pdf

"When young people are involved with the arts, something changes in their live s . We’ve often witnessed the rapt expressions on the faces of such young people . Advocates for the arts often use photographs of smiling faces to document the experience... Such images alone will not convince skeptics or even neutral decision-makers that something exceptional is happening when and where the arts become part of the lives of young people. Until now, we’ve known little about the nature of this change , or how to enable the change to occur. To understand these issues in more rigorous terms, we invited leading educational researchers to examine the impact of arts experiences on young people . We developed the Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning initiative in cooperation with The Arts Education Partnership and the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities to explore why and how young people were changed through arts experiences."

Key Findings

Why the Arts Change the Learning Experience

  • The arts reach students who are not otherwise being reached

  • The arts reach students in ways that they are not otherwise being reached

  • The Arts connect students to themselves and each other

  • The Arts transform the environment for learning

  • The arts provide learning opportunities for the adults in the lives of young people

  • The arts provide new challenges for theose students already considered successful

  • The arts connect learning experiences to the world of real work


The study also examined how the level of involvement in arts programs affected test scores and graduation rates, and found that the level of involvement in arts programs correlated to the gain in test scores. (more involvement means more test score gains). The study acknowledges confounding variables, but delineated between students of different socioeconomic statuses, and found similar gains in all student populations studied.

National Geographic is gearing up for the release of their show "Genius", about Albert Einstein (and his less-famous violin"Lina") and have a history of sharing scientific discovery about how music impacts the brain. In February of 2010, NatGeo published scientific finding about how the auditory processing center of the brain can be affected by music (read here) citing research that showed musicians, whose craft requires carefully listening to and evaluating sound patterns, have increased ability to silence background noise and focus on a specific sound pattern, such as a voice.

The overall effect is like a person learning to drive a manual transmission, Kraus said.

"When you first learn to drive a car, you have to think about the stick shift, the clutch, all the different parts," Kraus told National Geographic News. "But once you know, your body knows how to drive almost automatically" (NatGeo, February 2010).

For more on Einstein and his history with music, see related article here


Alive Inside!

Alive Inside copy.mp4

Music impacts different people in different ways. Henry's amazing story shows how music can unlock the brain - it can have a truly incredible impact.


If you're interested in this, neurologist Oliver Sacks (interviewed in this story) has a number of books about how your brain reacts to music - "Musicophilia" is a great place to start!

Good Numbers to Know:

Music and Arts - 888.731.5396

Music Forte - 215.946.9295

SmartMusic - 866.240.4041