Playing musical instruments may improve reading

[FarCenter]

Learning to play a musical instrument could help to improve children's reading and their ability to listen in noisy classrooms, according to new research.

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent - Published: 9:00PM GMT 20 Feb 2010

Neuroscientists have found that musicians benefit from heightened brain activity that allows them to process information from their eyes and ears more efficiently than non-musicians.

They found that the part of the brain that interprets sound, known as the auditory cortex, responds faster in people with musical training and is better primed to pick out subtle patterns from the huge volumes of information that flood into the brain from our senses.

Cheerful music 'can make everyone around you look happy'Professor Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist and amateur musician at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has also found that this part of the brain plays a crucial role in reading.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, she called for music to become a more important part of school syllabuses to help children develop better reading and language skills.

She said: "There is a strong argument for more musical education, especially in schools.

"Our eyes and ears take in millions of bits of information every second and it is not possible for the brain to process all of that, so the sensory systems in our brains are primed to tune into regularities or patterns in the signals it receives.

"People who are musically trained are better at picking up these patterns because they learn to recognise notes and pitches within melodies and harmonies.

"The better you are at picking up these patterns in music, the better reader you are. This makes sense as letters and words on a page are really just patterns."

<SNIP>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7279601/Playing-musical-instruments-may-improve-reading.html

[niyad]

1. and what are the first programs cut in schools? art and music

[slipslidingaway]

2. knr nt

[gristy]

3. This does not surprise me at all

As the article says, pattern recognition is important in both.

[BlueJazz]

4. Quite true. I'm Musically trained and I have an acute awareness of my surroundin,,

.....

[no_hypocrisy]

5. That was the basis for my undergraduate thesis 31 years ago.

I explored how the hand signals for the Kodaly system of sight-singing could be transferred to reading music on a staff and reinforcing comprehensive word-reading skills.

[BrklynLiberal]

6. Music is the key to much more knowledge than is recognized.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Amazon.com Review
Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.

Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.

The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. --Richard Dragan

[niyad]

8. thank you for reminding me about that book

[KonaKane]

7. Learning a musical instrument improves ALL learning

I teach piano and every one of my students' parents tell me their grades have come up since the lessons began. I have heard similiar stories from other teachers as well.

Learning languages also increases general learning.

[FrenchieCat]

9. I agree!

My daughter took piano lessons starting when she was 5, right as she was learning how to read.

She also attended a Bi-lingual elementary and middle school (french/English).

When she was 12, she took the SAT and scored better than 75% of HS seniors graduating that year.
She was recruited into the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Program (CTY).

She graduated from Harvard last summer,
and is currently in a PHD program.

Was this all attributed to the music?
I don't know, but I believe that learning to read Music, English and French,
at nearly the same time, helped her develop the capacity to compartmentalize
her mind early in life, and I do think that helped.
Also the foreign language gave her the concept of Root words.
She also studied Latin for 2 years....and that may have helped as well.

[AdHocSolver]

10. All mental ability is based on the premise: Use it or lose it!

The more mental activity that one does that exercises and challenges the brain, the stronger the brain "power" one develops.

On the pretext of "improving" education by eliminating "frills" such as art and music classes, and stressing teaching the "fundamentals", right-wing politicians and their lackeys in the "educator class" have dumbed down the curriculum with mind-numbing drudge work.

The result of this activity is a growing cadre of functionally illiterate, off-the-wall religious fundamentalist, anti-science, history revisionist, talk radio groupies who confuse their own ignorance with the real world.

This dumbing-down process has been going on for several decades now. If it will make you feel better, you can email a copy of the linked article to Arne Duncan. However, I doubt that it will make a difference.