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Feeling stressed? Try making music!

 If you’re not used to it, making music may seem like an odd way to combat stress. You might imagine the nerves of performance and the risks of getting it wrong. Yet there’s plenty of evidence that, appropriately tailored, programmes of music making can be a really effective route to reducing the everyday episodes of stress that we are all subject to, treating the symptoms of chronic stress, and even effective as part of a range of therapies for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And you don’t need to be a highly accomplished musician to get these benefits. We think of stress in many ways, but from a biological viewpoint stress is a source of changes to the way the brain regulates hormonal activity in the body, i.e. between the nervous system and the endocrine system via the neuroendocrine system . This system regulates many processes in the body including the immune system. In particular, secretion of neurohormones regulates the hypothalamus , which is altered by physical and em
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You don’t need perfect pitch to benefit from music making

Music making does you good at any level, from beginner to pro. A recent study (Leipold et al., 2021) examined a large (n=151) group of both musicians and non-musicians. They confirmed previous results that making music strengthens the connectivity between the hemispheres of the brain (see Practice that piano for a collosal callosum ). Interestingly these effects were consistent between the groups of musicians and non-musicians. Even better news, while half of the musicians studied had absolute pitch (commonly known as perfect pitch), there was no significant difference in the effects of music making on the brain functional and structural networks between the two groups. Incidentally, did you know that most birds only have absolute pitch? This sounds like a good thing, but in fact it means that if you train them to recognise a tune, and then play the same tune in a different key, they no longer recognise it. By contrast, primates (humans are primates) have been shown to have specialist
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Study says learning a musical instrument increases your IQ by 10 percent (?)

 A study of more than 4,600 volunteers has been reported recently . The volunteers chose a new hobby from a list including knitting, exercising and learning an instrument.  Apparently the "highest IQ increase came from the music-makers, averaging a score increase of 9.71 percent." and this was achieved after just six months. I'll be digging into the details of this study to establish its robustness.
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Bibliography

Here are some of the best books on how making music affects us. Some of these are well worth a read in themselves. I'll be drawing on them as sources for some of these posts. Often books like these don't give great references to the detailed science, but they're a good place to start. I've also listed some books on general aspects of how the brain works, which are important references and often have useful snippets on music. (Note: Links are to bookshop.org rather than to certain other hyperscale online booksellers. If you do choose to buy one of these, bookshop.org allows you to nominate a local bookshop to benefit from the sale. The world needs local bookshops.)  Books on how music affects us This is your brain on music ,  Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 2019. Music Advantage: How learning music helps your child's brain and wellbeing , Dr Anita Collins, Allen& Unwin, September 2021. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain , Dr Oliver Sacks, Pan Macmillan, 2018.
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Five good reasons to make music

Struggling to pick up your instrument to practice? Not sure if making music is for you?  Here are five good reasons to take the plunge, backed up by sound science: Playing an instrument as a child leads to a sharper mind in old age : those who had played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on tests to measure memory and other cognitive abilities than those with no musical background. 1 Higher intelligence: Children who received music lessons for one year gained an average of 2.7 IQ points more than a control group of children who did not over the same period, with particularly large increases in verbal ability, spatial ability, processing speed and attention. 2 Participating in making music for older people can result in lower mortality rates 3 ; lessen deterioration in physical health 4 and reduce the use of medication. Playing the piano exercises the heart as much as a brisk walk 5 . Making music develops your brain : extensive instrumental music trai
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Practice that piano for a collosal callosum

  One of my favourite pieces of music-playing research shows that regularly playing the piano has a direct impact on the size of your corpus callosum , which is a bundle of nerve fibres which connect the two halves - hemispheres  - of your brain.  It all makes good sense: both hands have to make fine movements, which as reported previously grows your motor cortex. But more importantly here, those movements, involving nerves in both hemispheres, have to be tightly coordinated. That requires the rapid exchange of information between both hemispheres, and a big chunky  corpus callosum  is the superhighway for that information. The original work is from a paper by Sara Bengtsson at the University of East Anglia [Bengtsson,05] I particularly love the nice clear graph which shows the cumulative effect of the piano practice which subjects put in throughout their lives: The x-axis shows the hours of practice in thousands  (no-one said it would be easy! This TED-ed video based on the same pape
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Want a bigger motor cortex? Play violin for one side, piano for both sides now...

  New Scientist  ( 15/5/21 ) reports on the work of Stanford Uni's David Eagleman, a neuroscientist seeking to build new senses - such as helping deaf people develop a new sense of 'hearing' via a wrist band which vibrates in time with sounds. Eagleman's work rests on the way the brain has been found in recent years to develop physically, building new connections and capabilities in response to repeated activity. This is usually known as neuroplasticity , where the synapses between the brain's neurons develop. Eagleman argues that this is too narrow a term as even the wiring within (rather than just between) neurons can develop, and prefers the term "livewired" to represent the way in which billions of neurons can reconfigure their circuitry every second. So what has this to do with making music? As a stark example of neuroplasticity Eagleman reports that when the brain of a violinist is viewed via a brain scan, one side of the motor cortex  is larger, be
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