Playing a musical instrument can cause fundamental changes in a child's brain and could improve the brain's functioning far into adulthood, new research finds.
Three new studies presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California, found that learning to play music can enhance a young person's ability to process information. In addition, music training can affect children's brains if they begin prior to the age of seven, and it can enhance connectivity between regions of the brain associated with creativity.
"Music might provide an alternative access into a broken or dysfunctional system within the brain," said Gottfried Schlaug, director of the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, at the conference. "Music has the unique ability to go through alternative channels and connect different sections of the brain."
"Early musical training does more good for kids than just making it easier for them to enjoy music," Yunxin Wang of Beijing Normal University, head researcher of one of the studies, told The Guardian. "It changes the brain and these brain changes could lead to cognitive advances as well."
In that study, researchers took brain scans of 48 Chinese adults aged between 19 and 21, who had had at least a year of musical training as children. The team found that brain regions related to hearing and self-awareness were larger in those who had begun their musical training before age seven.
In another study, Swedish researchers performed MRI scans of 39 pianists who were asked to play a 12-key piano keyboard while their scans took place. Piano players who had experience in jazz improvisation showed more connectivity between three major regions of the brain's frontal lobe when they improvised music, said lead author Ana Pinho of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute.
