Skip to main content

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 rates3; lessen deterioration in physical health4 and reduce the use of medication.

  • Playing the piano exercises the heart as much as a brisk walk5.

  • Making music develops your brain: extensive instrumental music training affects the anatomy of the brain with greater grey matter volumes in motor-related areas6 and greater white matter volumes in motor tracts7 with differences emerging after one year of music training8. The thickness of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres of the brain, is found to increase directly with the hours spent practising the piano9.


1 From https://www.nammfoundation.org/why-music-matters/music-research-seniors “Playing an instrument as a kid leads to a sharper mind in old age, according to a new study conducted by Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a clinical neuropsychologist in Emory’s Department of neurology, and her colleagues.  The researchers gave 70 people between the ages of 60 and 83 a battery of tests to measure memory and other cognitive abilities.  The researchers found that those who had played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on the tests than those with no musical background.- Quoted in Diane Cole, "Your Aging Brain Will Be in Better Shape If You've Taken Music Lessons," National Geographic, January 3, 2014” Full reference: “The Relation Between Instrumental Musical Activity and Cognitive Aging”, Brenda Hanna-Pladdy & Alicia MacKay, Neuropsychology. 2011 May ; 25(3): 378–386. doi:10.1037/a0021895.  paper


2From [Hallam,2015]  “Schellenberg (2004) randomly assigned a large sample of children to four different groups, two of which received music lessons (standard keyboard, Kodaly voice) for a year, the control groups receiving instruction in a non-musical artistic activity (drama) or no lessons. All four groups exhibited increases in IQ as would be expected over the time period but the music groups had reliably larger increases in full scale IQ with an effect size of .35. Children in the control groups had average increases of 4.3 points while the music groups had increases of seven points. On all but two of the 12 subtests the music group had larger increases than control groups. Notably, the music groups had larger increases on the four indexes that measured more specific abilities (verbal ability, spatial ability, processing speed, and attention).”


3From [Hallam,2015] ; ; )


4From [Hallam,2015]  ; ; )


5 From [Hallam,2015] )


6From [Hallam,2015] ; ; )


7From [Hallam,2015] )


8From [Hallam,2015] (Hyde et al., 2009; )


9Extensive piano practicing has regionally specific effects on white matter development 7.8.05 Sara L Bengtsson, Zoltán Nagy, Stefan Skare, Lea Forsman, Hans Forssberg & Fredrik Ullén Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 1148–1150 (2005) https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1516

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more