Scientists recently reported on the results of studies that investigated how music education changes the brain and how to translate that research to educational policy and the classroom.
Speaking at the " Learning and the Brain" conference was held in Washington D.C. on May 8, 2009, Barry Gordon, a behavioral neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist at John Hopkins University, said that art must do something to the brain and asked what that is and how could it be detected? Two studies addressed the effect that music instruction had on the brain.
Many participants cited the results of the Dana Foundation-funded research by cognitive neuroscientists at seven leading universities. The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation with principal interests in brain science.
Winner and Schlaug Study of Music and Brain changes
Over a four-year period, Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, and Gottfried Schlaug, a professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, studied children age 9 to 11, some of whom received regular music instruction.
In the initial results from data collected over 15 months, the researchers reported that students who received music instruction performed much better in what is called the near transfers domains: the two groups of students had performed equally before the music instrument instruction began. Winner and Schlaug observed strengthened connections in musically relevant areas of the brain among the students who had the music training compared with the nonmusic group.
Earlier studies with adult musicians showed structural and functional differences from those of nonmusicians. However the Winner and Schlaug study was the first to examine changes in the developing brain of children in response to long-term music training.
Posner Study of the Influence of Musical Training
Michael Posner, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, focused his research on the brain's executive attention network, which enables a state of alertness and ability to focus on a task and is linked to the self-regulation of impulses in children.
The studies used neuroimaging which gave a plausible mechanism by which arts training could influence cognition, including attention and IQ.
He found that children trained on attention-related tasks have more effective attention networks and even improved far transfer domains. Posner believes that controlled training, as in learning an musical instrument, can increase cognition and general attention.
There are several other reports that have been released by the Dana Press from the conference including "Attention May Link Arts and Intelligence", "The Arts Will Help School Accountability", "Six Good Reasons for Advocating the Importance of Arts in the Schools."
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