Brain Stew

The Red Planet

 Research continues to provide increasing amounts of data which substantiates the fact that music instruction has profound affects on human development; most notably in children.  Did you know the following?

♫ One study revealed that young children who received a year of musical training showed brain changes and superior memory compared with children who did not receive the instruction.  “It is very interesting that the children taking music lessons improved more over the year on general memory skills that are correlated with nonmusical abilities—such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ—than did the children not taking lessons,” said Laurel J. Trainor, researcher of the study at McMaster University in Canada.   -Fujioka, Ross, Kakigi, Pantev and Trainor.  Brain, a Journal of Neurology Oxford University Press, September 2006

♫ Music enhances the process of learning.  The systems they nourish, which include our integrated sensory, attention, cognitive, emotional and motor capacities, are shown to be the driving forces behind all other learning.  -Konrad, R.R., “Empathy, Arts and Social Studies.” 2000

♫ The College Entrance Examination Board reports, “Students of the arts continue to  outperform their non-arts peers on SAT.  In 2001, SAT takers with coursework/experience in music performance scored 57 points higher on the math portion than  students with no coursework/experience in the arts.” -Profile of SAT and Achievement Test Takers, The College Board, compiled by MENC, 2001, 1996