How the Brain Benefits from Early Music Training

I came across an article entitled, "Even A Few Years of Music Training Benefits the Brain." Naturally, it caught my attention.

The article discusses the benefits of music education received at a young age, the impact that it has on you as a child, and the lasting benefits as an adult.

Image from the original article:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/08/21/even-

a-few-years-of-music-training-benefits-the-brain/?WT.mc_id=SA_syn_HuffPo

I decided to lay out the main benefits discussed in the article, beginning with this: Even kids who only play for a few years have benefits: "short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning."


Benefits That Show Even When We're Young:

• Shapes how brains develop, improving the ability to differentiate sounds and speech
• Strong linguistic benefits
• Improves performance on everyday listening tasks, making us better at focusing on sound and perceiving different sounds
• Better performance in school: 
• stronger reading skills, increased math abilities, and higher general intelligence scores
• Improves social development

Benefits That Continue To Show As We Age:

• Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise
• Adults who had only a few years of musical training as children had more robust neural processing of different test sounds than those who had not had training. They were also more effective at pulling out the lowest frequency sound of the test noises

As we all know, music training benefits many aspects of life. The two things that came to mind after reading this article:

1) The importance of music education, and the impact it can have on our children and their lives as adults
2) Music education helps the brain at any age - it's never too late to start (take it from my Mom and co-founder of iCA - she picked her instrument up at age 48!)

Make sure to go read the full article (from which I quoted much of the above) to learn about the importance of everything listed and more - it's worth it!

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/08/21/even-a-few-years-of-music-training-benefits-the-brain/?WT.mc_id=SA_syn_HuffPo - by Christine Wilcox


Check back next week to see our next blog post, which is all about Jazz, since April is Jazz Appreciation Month!



Heather (iCA President)
www.InstrumentCareApparel.com