Take some time to read this very interesting article about Music Lessons and IQ. It may astound you!!!
Music Lessons and IQ
Can music lessons positively affect our life in a significant way? Tests and studies show greater brain gray matter development and better IQ results in musicians. Take a look!
In the process of learning music the brain modifies, it actually enlarges within certain areas connected with this particular task. Studies (Pascual-Leone 2001) and brain scans have revealed that the musicians’ brain is different; for example a piano player has got more gray matter in the region that controls the fingers’ movement.
In the study named "The Effects of Musical Training on Structural Brain Development several scientists investigated the structural changes that occur in the brain as a result of 15 months of instrumental music teaching on young children; this group was compared to a group of children that did not have musical training.
As expected, the children who participated in the music training showed improved finger moving and rhythm task yet the tasks that did not involved musical field remained the same. The gray matter development has been also observed in areas other than those directly connected with music namely - hearing and finger moving. The complex process of learning produces growth in other parts of the brain and these facts lead to the idea that long-term programs of brain training may well help neuron growth in children. This is particularly relevant for children with developmental problems as well as for grownups with neurological conditions.
Musicians generally have more gray matter (Schlaug et al 2005) compared to non musicians and he also has shown that children who play instruments have also a significant increase of gray matter. What’s more, when professional and amateur musicians are compared, it is clearly revealed that the professionals who actually practice twice as much have again, more of a brain development than the amateurs (Gaser and Schlaug 2003). It is than obvious that brain development can be associated with learning music, yet is this development only significant for music related tasks or is it relevant in other tasks as well?
Studies conducted on musicians and non-musicians bring light upon a diversity of differences, some notable and some statistically proven. A testing on cognitive tasks (Schellenberg 2006) shows that musician usually do better than their non-musical peers when it comes to cognitive tasks. Also increased memory levels have been noticed in musically trained children with ages between 4 to 6 years old when compared to the non-musical children of the same age.
Here is a list of tasks where it has been observed that musically trained people perform better (Schellenberg 2006 and Patel and Iverson 2007): vocabulary, math, reading, verbal memory, space orientation skills and phonemic awareness.
Another study E. Glenn Schellenberg (2006) shows that musically trained school children got better results on IQ tests. Several intellectual abilities are connected to music learning and seem to have a beneficial influence in developing musicians’ memory in areas connected to fluid intelligence like the speed of processing, verbal comprehension, working memory and perceptual organization.
The overall constructive effect of music is recognized and since science proves more and more how beneficial it generally is, why not take the advantage from it? If you like music do your best to learn it, to achieve as much as you can, you gain a lot in all the other fields as well!
By Claudia Miclaus
