playing-music

Playing Music as a Protection Against Dementia

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In a recent post we saw that music may help peo­ple with demen­tia learn new facts. This arti­cle explores anoth­er rela­tion­ship between music and demen­tia: play­ing a musi­cal instru­ment, even as an ama­teur, may pro­tect the brain lat­er on against demen­tia-relat­ed damages.

Researchers had 70 peo­ple ages 60 to 83 per­form a vari­ety of tests to mea­sure visu­ospa­tial mem­o­ry, abil­i­ty to name objects, the brain’s abil­i­ty to adapt to new infor­ma­tion […] those who had engaged in musi­cal activ­i­ty for 10 years or longer scored sub­stan­tial­ly bet­ter than those with no musi­cal activ­i­ty in their past.

the longer peo­ple play instru­ments, the more ben­e­fits they may derive.

All were ama­teurs who had start­ed play­ing when they were 10 years old. [Read more…] about Play­ing Music as a Pro­tec­tion Against Dementia

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