Playing Music Makes You Smart - Charles Q. Choi

Playing Music Makes You Smart Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Mon Mar 19, 9:35 AM ET


Scientists have uncovered the first concrete evidence that playing
music can significantly enhance the brain and sharpen hearing for all
kinds of sounds, including speech.

"Experience with music appears to help with many other things in
life, potentially transferring to activities like reading or picking
up nuances in tones of voices or hearing sounds in a noisy classroom
better," researcher Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern
University, told LiveScience.

These new findings highlight the importance of music classes, she
said.

"Music classes are often among the first to be cut when school
budgets get tight," Kraus said. "That's a mistake."

Experiments started with 20 adult volunteers, who watched and
listened to a movie of their choice. "'Men in Black,' 'The
Incredibles, ' 'Best in Show' were favorites," Kraus said.

As they watched movies, the volunteers also listened to Mandarin
words that sounded like "mi" continuously at conversation level in
the background. Mandarin is a tone language, where a single word can
differ in meaning depending on its tone. For example, the Mandarin
word "mi" means "to squint" when delivered in a level tone, "to
bewilder" when spoken in a rising tone, and "rice" when given in a
falling then rising tone.

The researchers recorded neural responses from the brains of
volunteers during the experiments. Half the volunteers had at least
six years of training in a musical instrument starting before the age
of 12. The others had no more than three years of musical experience.
All were native English speakers who had no knowledge of Mandarin.

"Even with their attention focused on the movie and though the sounds
had no linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically
trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different
tones than the non-musicians, " said neuroscientist Patrick Wong at
Northwestern University.

Wong emphasized these results were seen "in more or less everyday
people. You don't have to be a top musician to find these kinds of
effects."

Surprisingly, the researchers found these changes occurred in the
brainstem, the ancient part of the brain responsible for controlling
automatic, critical body functions such as breathing and heartbeat.

Music was thought largely to be the province of the cerebral cortex,
where higher brain functions such as reasoning, thought and language
are seated. The brainstem was thought to be unchangeable and
uninvolved in the complex processes linked with music.

"These results show us how malleable to experience the brainstem
actually is," Kraus said of the findings detailed in the April issue
of the journal Nature Neuroscience. "We think music engages higher
level functions in the cortex that actually tune the brainstem."

Much remains open for investigation. "How much musical training would
you need for this to be helpful?" Kraus wondered. "Would music help
children with literacy problems? How old would you have to be to see
these effects?"

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