*This post originally appeared on The PediaBlog on February 22, 2013.
This Is Your Brain On Rock
This is interesting:
Young children learning to play the drums, or a tiny violin, or the piano might not be making music to their parents’ ears, but they definitely are making their brains grow. New research proves that music training in children aged younger than 7 years significantly enhances white matter in their brains that controls sensorimotor abilities.
Annette Kingsbury took a look at the research examining the relationship between early exposure to music and brain development in children and found:
- Preschoolers who had keyboard training did better at math reasoning than another group that had computer training instead.
- College students who had received musical training before age 12 remembered significantly more words from a list than other students.
- Infants can distinguish differences in pitch, melody and rhythm from very early on. In fact, they even seem to recognize music they were exposed to repeatedly in the womb.
- Students who received daily music training for seven months had higher reading scores at the end than did a control group. A year later, their scores were still higher than the control groups.
- Preschoolers were able to learn body parts better in a lesson that used music and dance as opposed to conventional lessons, or even one including movement but no music.
Journal of Neuroscience abstract here.
For your listening pleasure: