musical-training

Study: Music Training Can Enhance Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function

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Very inter­est­ing new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Short-Term Music Train­ing Enhances Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Func­tion.

Abstract: Researchers have designed train­ing meth­ods that can be used to improve men­tal health and to test the effi­ca­cy of edu­ca­tion pro­grams. How­ev­er, few stud­ies have demon­strat­ed broad trans­fer from such train­ing to per­for­mance on untrained cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties. Here we report the effects of two inter­ac­tive com­put­er­ized train­ing pro­grams devel­oped for preschool chil­dren: one for music and one for visu­al art. After only 20 days of train­ing, [Read more…] about Study: Music Train­ing Can Enhance Ver­bal Intel­li­gence and Exec­u­tive Function

Music: Another Pillar of Brain Fitness?

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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 brain beyond music. Specif­i­cal­ly, musi­cians may have an advan­tage for pro­cess­ing speech in chal­leng­ing lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ments com­pared with non-musi­cians [Read more…] about Music: Anoth­er Pil­lar of Brain Fitness?

Do we need more music education?

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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: [Read more…] about Do we need more music education?

Our Brain on Music: We need to do more than listen

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.What’s The Size Of The Mozart Effect? The Jury Is In.

In a now well-known 1993 paper in Nature called “Music and spa­tial task per­for­mance”, Frances H. Rausch­er and her col­leagues report that par­tic­i­pants who were exposed to the first move­ment “alle­gro con spir­i­to” of the Mozart Sonata KV 448 for Two Pianos in D major scored sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er on stan­dard­ized tests of abstract/spatial rea­son­ing abil­i­ty than those who were instruct­ed to relax or those who just sat there in silence.

Even though the par­tic­i­pants in Rausch­er et al.‘s study were col­lege stu­dents, and they did­n’t admin­is­ter a full bat­tery of cog­ni­tive tests to prop­er­ly assess gen­er­al intel­li­gence, their find­ings trans­lat­ed into “play Mozart to your chil­dren and they will grow up smart.” A cot­tage indus­try was born. [Read more…] about Our Brain on Music: We need to do more than listen

Brain Fitness Newsletter: mid-February Edition

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Brain exercise, brain exercisesOur Jan­u­ary Newslet­ter received a good deal of feed­back from many read­ers. Based on it, our new approach is to select the top 10 most impor­tant arti­cles every oth­er week. Please take a look at this first exper­i­ment, and let us know you feedback.

(Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our month­ly newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this newslet­ter by email).

Top 10 Arti­cles Feb­ru­ary 1st-15th:

News and Events

Stress Man­age­ment is Key Fac­tor For Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness: a great cov­er sto­ry in US News & World Report, and an excel­lent arti­cle in Pre­ven­tion Mag­a­zine that was high­light­ed on the Today Show this week, both fea­ture the impor­tance of [Read more…] about Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter: mid-Feb­ru­ary Edition

Musical training as mental exercise for cognitive performance

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We often hear (glad­ly!) how teach­ers use our blog arti­cles and brain teasers in their class­es. We also hear how many psy­chol­o­gy and biol­o­gy teach­ers are get­ting their stu­dents excit­ed about brain research, and, to con­tribute to their efforts, we like to rec­og­nize some great initiatives.

Last year, Jef­frey Gonce, a Psy­chol­o­gy teacher at Red Land High School (West Shore School Dis­trict, PA) asked his stu­dents to “com­plete a project describ­ing a recent brain (or genet­ic) study that affects behav­ior.” The stu­dents could opt to post their arti­cles online, and Jef­frey was kind enough to send us a link to read the results. We enjoyed read­ing them all, and pub­lished in our blog this beau­ti­ful essay, titled “Tis bet­ter to give than receive”, writ­ten by Alexan­dra, which Piano musical training was sub­se­quent­ly includ­ed in a num­ber of neu­ro­science an psy­chol­o­gy blogs.

This year, Jef­frey also sent us his stu­dents’ essays, and we are going to rec­og­nize and pub­lish this great essay by high school stu­dent Megan. Enjoy!
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It has long been the source of sci­en­tif­ic debate as to whether music can improve the cog­ni­tive process­es in chil­dren. Referred to by some as “The Mozart Effect,” a strong [Read more…] about Musi­cal train­ing as men­tal exer­cise for cog­ni­tive performance