Music: Another Pillar of Brain Fitness?

Musi­cians’ brains are often used as mod­els of neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty. Indeed, numer­ous stud­ies to date have shown that musi­cal train­ing can change the brain. Musi­cians have larg­er brain vol­ume in areas that are impor­tant for play­ing an instru­ment: motor, audi­to­ry and visuo-spa­­tial regions. A recent Nature Review Neu­ro­science arti­cle shows that music train­ing can ben­e­fit the…

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Do we need more music education?

We recent­ly pub­lished an arti­cle exam­in­ing the “Mozart effect” and the con­clu­sions were that there is very lit­tle evi­dence that lis­ten­ing to music does boost men­tal func­tions. How­ev­er learn­ing to play an instru­ment does seem to do the trick. In this recent Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can arti­cle, the edi­tors point out that:

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