Research Roundup: Neuroscience and Music By: Kristen Laine

This is your brain on music. If you’re of a certain era, you might recognize the echo of an anti-drug campaign in the phrase. It’s actually the title of a book by (Penguin, 2006) — a musician (saxophone, guitar), sound engineer, and consultant for Santana, the Grateful Dead, and other bands in the ’80s and early ’90s. Levitin went on to become a neuroscientist; he is known for the “Levitin effect,” which changed the way scientists think about auditory memories by showing that even non-musicians recalled songs in the correct key.

Levitin is among a number of researchers in the interdisciplinary science of the nervous system who are working to understand “your brain on music.” Increasingly sophisticated brain-imaging technology is illuminating neurological structures and processes for a wide range of sensory and motor tasks, even thoughts and perceptions. Neuroscientists have discovered that studying how we learn, play, and remember music can reveal how the brain changes and adapts. That same research has the potential to move conversations about the value of away from correlations with GPAs and SATs toward a more fundamental understanding — and appreciation — of human experience.

Musicians are “a model of auditory learning,” according to Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at the leading edge of the research. Kraus directs a team of researchers at the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University and has authored or co-authored nearly 50 papers on the in the past five years alone.

Kraus’s work provides “converging evidence that music training can improve neural encoding of speech.” The implications are startling: Music training improves verbal memory, verbal intelligence, auditory attention, reading, and literacy. It improves the ability to hear and distinguish speech from background noise. The benefits show up after only two years of musical training; more years of training translate into even greater gains. The benefits of music training appear to be protected from age-related neural declines, even 40 years after training has stopped.

During the same years that Kraus’s team was detailing the powerful benefits of learning music, however, the path that many schoolchildren took to learning music was becoming increasingly vulnerable to budget cuts. Kraus understood that those cuts disproportionately affected children in low-income communities — the populations least likely to afford the one-on-one training her studies typically described.

In 2011, the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory entered into a partnership with Los Angeles-based Harmony Project, a nonprofit organization that provides free music instruction to children in low-income neighborhoods. Kraus sent a small group of researchers to study children before they entered the program and after one and two years of community music lessons. In other research, Kraus had determined that children growing up in poor families, and who have long been known to hear significantly fewer words than children in professional families (the “30-million word gap”), filled that gap with a form of neural noise. The resulting “static” made individual sounds more “blurry” and difficult for the children to process.

Early results from the Harmony Project study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience earlier this month, show that although the static did not disappear after two years of music lessons, the children’s brains processed sound more precisely and more quickly. Kraus’s researchers performed similar research on high school students from inner-city public schools in Chicago. Students who took two years of in-school music classes showed similar benefits in the brain’s ability to encode and process language.

Kraus’s team will continue to follow the young musicians in the Harmony Project through their schooling. More than 90% of previous Harmony Project graduates have gone on to college, despite dropout rates of 50% and more in their communities. Encouraging as such numbers are, the work of Kraus and others may lead to more profound discoveries: By exploring “your brain on music,” neuroscience may help us understand music as a unique, basic expression of being human.

RESEARCH LINKS: Chicago Study Harmony Project Study NPR spot on Harmony Project Research Research 2014

KRISTEN LAINE’S book American Band, which won the PEN New England award for nonfiction, followed the lives of directors, students, and families through a year in one of the nation’s best music programs. She is pleased to be writing on topics in music education for Touchpoint.

Published in the September 23, 2014 edition of Touchpoint