Favorite line from the first one: "I've just gotten used to repeating one phrase until I can play it at the proper speed, and well, and musically."
Could this skill have broader cognitive effects?
The second post is on how participation in music--not just passive listening--is necessary in order to get the broader cognitive benefits.
Effect of music on cognitive function
Playing an instrument seems to make learning math and foreign languages easier, but researchers aren’t sure why.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los…)
Taylor Bredberg is an ardent fan of the indie band Grizzly Bear and the TV series "Lost," an amateur filmmaker and a doodler of figures that bring to mind Tim Burton's kinetic grostesques.
But if those interests make him a pretty normal teenager, Bredberg's eight-year relationship with the piano may have made him a little more unusual: He is a kid with the attention span of an anesthesiologist, the persistence and discipline of an Olympic athlete and the emotional range of an artist.
"Piano has shaped me, yeah," says Bredberg, who began taking lessons after his family discovered him, at 7, plinking out on his own the pieces his older sister was learning in lessons. "In terms of discipline and creativity, I'd have been a much different person if I hadn't played piano."
Once a week, Bredberg studies the instrument at the elite Colburn School for Performing Arts in Los Angeles. And he practices for several hours a day, favoring pieces by the Russian composers who are his favorites: Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. When he feels more delicate, he favors Debussy.
As a freshman, Bredberg has been learning to speak Russian as well, and he finds Algebra 2 a cinch. "It's always been pretty understandable to me. It's very logical," he says. He recognizes the challenge of learning math as one that requires the same methodical patience it takes to learn Prokofiev's 3rd Sonata in A minor, his current project: "I've just gotten used to repeating one phrase until I can play it at the proper speed, and well, and musically," he says. "I guess that can contribute to not getting frustrated after having to repeat so many [math] problems."
Kids like Taylor Bredberg underscore a key problem that researchers have in understanding the link between music-making and cognitive performance. Bredberg hails from the kind of educated family in which music instruction is more common to begin with — an environmental advantage that may account for his particular mental strengths. To truly learn what music-making can do for academic skills, researchers say they must pluck kids from a wider range of family environments and offer them music lessons, rather than just study kids whose families have sought out musical instruction for them. That's the only way they will be able to disentangle the effects of early environment from those of musical instruction, they say.
If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los…)
Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.
In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.
As if all that weren't enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.
But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you'll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.
You gotta get in there and play. Or sing, bang or pluck.
"The Mozart effect? That's just crap," says Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who conducts research on the effect of music and musical instruction.
Even the author of the 1993 study that set off the commercial frenzy says her group's findings — from an experiment that had college students, not babies, listen to Mozart — were "grossly misapplied and over-exaggerated." Psychologist Frances Rauscher, along with the rest of the field studying music's effects on the brain, has long since moved on to explore the effect of active musical instruction on cognitive performance.
The upshot of their work is clear: Learning to make music changes the brain and boosts broad academic performance. Findings across the board suggest that, even for a kid who will not grow up to be a Wynton Marsalis or a Joshua Bell, spending money and time on music lessons and practice is a solid investment in mental fitness.
Entrepreneur Don Campbell, dubbed the "P.T. Barnum of the Mozart effect," has built a thriving online business selling CDs with names like "Mozart to Go" to enhance children's creativity and school performance. And, Campbell says on his website, parents of children with dyslexia, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should buy his CDs to improve their children's neuropsychiatric conditions.
Campbell's sales pitch melds seemingly scientific claims with breathless hype. Mozart's compositions "modify attentiveness and alertness" because their "structural and not overly emotional expression helps clarify time/space perception." His proprietary mixes of the prodigy's music, writes Campbell, draw on "psychological, physiological, and aesthetic factors to achieve a variety of auditory, physical, and emotional responses."
Wolfgang Amadeus is not the only composer beloved by entrepreneurs promising smarter children. Internet sites offer fretful new parents a range of slow, synthesized music by other musical greats, including J.S. Bach, Haydn and Vivaldi.
A "Baroque-a-bye Baby CD," its cover showing a blissed-out baby clamped into earphones and a slant seat, promises that its musical offerings will mimic mother's heartbeat at 60 beats per minute, offering "mathematical perfection and symmetry" designed to "stimulate your child's brain."
If only basking in surround sound were enough. The effect of listening to beloved classical music is at best small, fleeting and — with all deference to the late-18th century musical genius — not even unique to Mozart, Schellenberg says.
True, listening to music we like — whether it's hip-hop, show tunes or Schubert — does makes us feel good. Positive mood, in turn, increases focus and attention, which improves performance on many tests of mental sharpness. In some, but not all, studies, that includes improvements in the kind of mental skills we use in doing complex math problems, interpreting driving directions and pondering how to fit a large bookcase in the trunk of a small car.
But the performance-enhancing effect, Schellenberg says, lingers for no more than about 10 minutes after the music stops.
Learning to play, he has found, is a far better bet. In a 2004 study, he and his colleagues randomly assigned 144 6-year-olds to receive instruction in keyboard, voice, drama or nothing. After a year, kids who got keyboard or voice lessons showed a 3-point IQ boost on average over the kids taking drama or no lessons at all.
It's a modest improvement but one that may build on itself since, for all its faults, IQ is a reliable predictor of a child's performance in school. Better performance in school typically leads to more and better schooling — which, in turn, further increases IQ.
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