We reveal ourselves through our musical preferences and our personalities are also shaped by them.
Vital turning points and formative relationships are played out to the soundtrack of our teens and young adulthood — never to be forgotten.
How to use music to give your brain a boost.
People walking on a treadmill reported feeling thy were exerting themselves less while listening to this music.
People in the study were only played up to one second snippets of 100 hundred different songs.
Music students end up one academic year ahead of their non-musical peers.
Music can have a magical effect on people who are not habitually active.
People in the study listened to and then played a Tibetan singing bowl.
People in the study listened to and then played a Tibetan singing bowl.
Playing a musical instrument can help protect against cognitive decline.
The reason is that learning to play changes the brain’s ‘wiring’, new research finds.
The neuroscientists found that the brain can compensate for disease or injuries.
Dr Bernhard Ross, study’s first author, said:
“Music has been known to have beneficial effects on the brain, but there has been limited understanding into what about music makes a difference.
This is the first study demonstrating that learning the fine movement needed to reproduce a sound on an instrument changes the brain’s perception of sound in a way that is not seen when listening to music.”
The research involved 32 young, healthy adults who listened to and then played a Tibetan singing bowl.
Brain scans showed that playing the singing bowl was enough to change brain activity.
Dr Ross said:
“It has been hypothesized that the act of playing music requires many brain systems to work together, such as the hearing, motor and perception systems.
This study was the first time we saw direct changes in the brain after one session, demonstrating that the action of creating music leads to a strong change in brain activity.”
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Ross et al., 2017).
The effect of musical training on language skills and the brain’s response to sound.
The effect of musical training on language skills and the brain’s response to sound.
Musical training — even when started as late as high school — sharpens skills critical to academic success, new research finds.
Teenagers had sharper hearing and language skills after musical training, the psychologists concluded.
Benefits were seen after the adolescents took group music classes.
Professor Nina Kraus, who led the study, said:
“While music programs are often the first to be cut when the school budget is tight, these results highlight music’s place in the high school curriculum.
Although learning to play music does not teach skills that seem directly relevant to most careers, the results suggest that music may engender what educators refer to as ‘learning to learn.'”
The conclusions come from a study which followed 40 adolescents from before they entered high school until three years later.
Around half started band classes while the rest joined the junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).
Those taking the band classes had three hours of group instruction per week in school.
Electrical activity in their brains was measured before and afterwards.
The musical group showed more rapid maturation in the brain’s response to sound.
They also had better language skills than those who had joined the ROTC.
The authors conclude:
“Our results support the notion that the adolescent brain remains receptive to training, underscoring the importance of enrichment during the teenage years.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Tierney et al., 2015).
Listening to music image from Shutterstock
This type of training boosts the brain’s language centres in young and old.
This type of training boosts the brain’s language centres in young and old.
Musical training in younger years can protect the brain from normal age-related decay of language skills, a new study finds.
Adults who had received musical training as youngsters were 20% faster at identifying speech sounds than non-musicians, neuroscientists have discovered.
Age has detrimental effects on many areas of cognitive function: one of these is that older people find it more difficult to understand speech, despite often having no measurable hearing loss.
This is because the part of the brain that processes speech gets weaker in later years.
In this study, though, adults who had started musical training before the age of 14 and continued for up to 10 years showed better functioning in this part of the brain.
Dr Gavin Bidelman, who led the study, said:
“Musical activities are an engaging form of cognitive brain training and we are now seeing robust evidence of brain plasticity from musical training not just in younger brains, but in older brains too.”
In the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 20 healthy adults aged between 55 and 75 listened to random speech sounds, like ‘ooo’ and ‘ahhh’ (Bidelman & Alain, 2015).
While some of the sounds were obviously either an ‘ooo’ or an ‘ahhh’, others were mixed together to make them more difficult to identify.
During testing, the electrical activity in the brain was measured as people tried to identify the sounds.
Dr Bidelman said:
“In our study we were able to predict how well older people classify or identify speech using EEG imaging.
We saw a brain-behaviour response that was two to three times better in the older musicians compared to non-musicians peers.
In other words, old musicians’ brains provide a much more detailed, clean and accurate depiction of the speech signal, which is likely why they are much more sensitive and better at understanding speech.”
Man listening image from Shutterstock
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