Music of the Hemispheres

(((( a mind for music )))) Music of the heMispheres won’t make you smarter, a growing body of evidence suggests that playing his music will. Musical training doesn’t Music of the just make you a better musician — the acquired skills seem to transfer to other areas, various studies have found. And research focused on the brain’s particu- hemispheres lar relationship with music and language suggests that engaging the mind with Playing instruments gives brains a boost musical training could remedy language By Rachel Ehrenberg s Photograph by Cary Wolinsky impairments such as dyslexia. “There really is now so much evidence ot so long ago, Mozart mania music and smarts. In the original study, showing that musical experience has a swept the nation. A small the “Mozart effect” was minor and lasted pervasive effect on how the nervous sys- study found that students only minutes. Follow-up studies found tem gets molded and shaped throughout who listened to 10 minutes of the effect specific neither to the com- our lifetimes,” says Nina Kraus, head of Na Mozart sonata performed better on poser nor to music. Students listening to the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory a paper-folding task than their peers, Mozart were just more stimulated than at Northwestern University in Evanston, and suddenly a flourishing industry those listening to a relaxation tape or Ill. “This kind of transformation comes sprouted. Mozart’s music sang from CDs silence. And while arousal can improve about only with active engagement with and videos marketed for children, babies learning, research suggests, the effects sound. My daddy always said, ‘You never and moms-to-be. The craze reached can be fleeting and aren’t limited to get something for nothing.’ You’re not a crescendo when Georgia’s governor music. Assessments of the original report going to get big biceps by watching wres- Zell Miller included $105,000 in his now tend to be dirges: In the May-June tlers — you’ve got to do it.” state budget to send every child born in issue of Intelligence, researchers from the In the long run, musical training a Georgia hospital home with a classical University of Vienna published a paper appears to improve a suite of verbal and music tape or CD. titled “Mozart effect–Shmozart effect.” nonverbal skills. Playing an instrument “No one questions that listening to “It’s a short-lived effect and it spawned may add finesse to how people move their music at a very early age affects the spa- a huge industry of baby Einstein, baby bodies. Making music makes you hear tial, temporal reasoning that underlies Mozart CDs, all sorts of stuff,” says better, fine-tuning the ability to extract math and engineering and even chess,” Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences a signal from noise. Musical training also Miller said. Institute in San Diego. “But the science may improve grammar skills, the ability Actually, a lot of researchers ques- behind it is pretty thin.” to grasp meaning from words and to dis- tioned the link between listening to Yet even though listening to Mozart tinguish a question from a command. Until recently, establishing cause and Music experiment Language experiment effect for music’s mental impact has been difficult. But long-term studies peering into brain structure and activity are now showing that musical training changes the brain in lasting ways. The brain on beats Playing an instrument calls upon cir- Musically trained Not musically trained Musically trained Not musically trained cuitry from many areas of the brain, says Say what? When children with musical training hear a sequence that ends with a “hanging” Daniel Levitin, director of the music per- chord, their brains respond more strongly than do other children (shown at left, darker is more ception, cognition and expertise labora- intense). these kids also show stronger responses to violations in sentence syntax (shown at right). tory at McGill University in Montreal. For a long time, music was consid- The breadth of the musician’s task and mance demonstrated by musicians on ered a creative “right brain” endeavor. the required cognitive effort are probably some tasks is more about nurture than That idea has now gone the way of the behind much of the enhancement of other nature. Teasing out that balance has onservatory c Macarena. Music processing is distrib- skills, says neuroscientist Laurel Trainor, been a recent focus of Gottfried Schlaug’s uted throughout the brain, says Levitin, director of the auditory development lab music and neuroimaging research at the hore hore s and playing an instrument, in particular, at McMaster University in Hamilton, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center outh outh s is an ensemble activity. It involves pay- Canada. Playing an instrument “engages and Harvard Medical School. ing attention, thinking ahead, remem- basically most of your brain,” Trainor A study by Schlaug’s team found that bering, coordinating movement and says. The activity appears to boost exec- after 15 months of weekly keyboard les- hanks to the the to hanks t interpreting constant feedback to the utive function, being the boss of your sons, 6-year-olds showed greater change ears, fingers and, in some cases, lips. body and mind. Evidence suggests that in their brains than kids who attended a photo: photo: “It’s one of the most complicated tasks with musical training comes improved weekly music class without instrument that we have,” Levitin says. “Take a sym- memory, finer motor skills and better training. Among the most changed were phony orchestra. What you have is 80 or attention control — the ability to ignore a part of the auditory cortex and brain NeuroImage 2009; 2009; NeuroImage 100 of the most highly trained members one thing and pay attention to something regions involved in control of move- of our society — more highly trained than else. “Our working hypothesis is that it’s ments. Kids with training also did better oelsch/ k . astronauts or surgeons in terms of the these control processes that are what is on tests related to finger movement and s numbers of hours and years of prepara- key for the transfer effects,” Trainor says. discerning melodies and rhythm, Schlaug tion — and they are performing the works Some musicians are certainly musi- and colleagues reported last year in the of some of the greatest minds that ever cally inclined to begin with. But recent Journal of Neuroscience. Jentschke and and Jentschke . s lived. It’s really extraordinary.” work suggests that the superior perfor- For most people, the transfer effects Though the “Mozart effect” appears to be hype, studies do show that musical training can improve language and auditory skills. 31 (((( a mind for music )))) Music of the heMispheres of musical training are probably modest, some circuitry appears to be specific to Shared processing of music’s and lan- says Trainor. “Otherwise, we’d expect music or language, new evidence empha- guage’s building blocks is evidenced by musicians to be the most intelligent peo- sizes areas of overlap. Both music and lan- the brain’s recognition of construction ple on the planet,” she says. But musical guage have syntax — just as there are rules gone awry. Within milliseconds of hear- training may strike a particularly rich governing the construction of sentences ing a sentence spoken with irregular chord for people with language difficul- from words, there are rules for “build- structure, neurons fire in a specific area ties. “There is quite a bit of evidence now ing” a piece of instrumental music. You of the brain, researchers have learned. that musical training does have benefits don’t just randomly throw notes together. The brain also reacts to violations in for people with dyslexia and language (As with language, these rules may differ chord structure. impairments,” Trainor says. across cultures.) The brain seems to tap Musically trained kids are better at into the same neural circuitry when pro- hearing these violations than kids with- Peas in a syntactic pod cessing how the building blocks of lan- out training, says Sebastian Jentschke, Evidence that the brain holds music and guage or music fit together into a greater, now at University College London. language in one embrace began to mount hierarchical structure. Musically trained brains are also better when imaging studies by Patel, Stefan “You can have overlap in the machin- at detecting violations in sentence struc- Koelsch of the Freie Universität Berlin ery that puts the pieces together,” Patel ture, Koelsch and Jentschke reported in and others suggested that areas of the says. “They may be different pieces, but NeuroImage last year. The inverse rela- brain instrumental for processing lan- the machinery that puts them together tionship also holds; kids with Specific guage are also important for music. While is shared.” Language Impairment, marked by dif- ficulties with grammar and complex syntax, also have trouble processing musical Take two stanzas and call me in the morning syntax, Koelsch, Jentschke and collabo- from poets to politicians, people have long described music as medicine for rators reported in 2008 in the Journal of the heart and soul. now scientists are taking a literal look at such musings, Cognitive Neuroscience. investigating music as a means to alleviate pain and enhance recovery. though These studies highlight the neu- some studies are still in the early stages, your favorite soundtrack may one ral intimacy of processing music and day accompany a prescription. processing language. “It’s a reason- able assumption that musical training Alzheimer’s disease: that pregnant women who while walking showed might help with kids with impairments studies have shown that listen to music for 30 min- improved fitness, a study with processing skills in the language individuals with alzheimer’s utes a day report reduced found.

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