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A lot of people play music because it makes them feel cooler, but apparently it can make you smarter too.
A new data-driven review by Northwestern University that was published July 20 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal strongly suggests that the neural connections made during musical training prime the brain for other aspects of communication.
For example, 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.
The research also suggests that music could be extremely beneficial for children with learning disorders such as dyslexia.
Read more on this research here, and to find out how you can held us to support music education, visit the Fender Outreach page.
This makes sense to me; music and communication have a lot in common. There is a rhythm and timing to speech, there are quiet and loud passages to control the intensity, there are pitch changes to indicate mood. Music is like a universal language that is understood no matter where in the world you came from. Even if not everyone is suited to being a musician and playing, whether professionally or for fun, at least having some instruction is helpful. Not only does it better enable a person to appreciate music played on musical instruments by musicians, it also, apparently, helps enrich the human living experience. Great article! Love this story.
This makes perfect sense. It’s forcing the brain to focus and to be aware of other changes going on and reacting to those changes. It also teaches children discipline, comeraderie, and respect.
Growing up with ADD and dyslexia, music helped me to understand math concepts, reading, writing, organization, creative thinking, and created a sense of appreciation for history, the humanities. As I got into college and learned more about the transferral of sound, I became more interested in physics and other sciences because I was able to see a relationship between the cause and the effect more clearly.
My spelling, however, is still attrocious.