How does music make you smarter

When we learn to play music, our senses actively interact, including sight, touch, hearing, balance, movement, and proprioception body awareness. There are two things that make music fairly unique in this process. First, when you play music, you are using all of your senses. For example, you feel the instrument in your hands, hear the sounds you play and see the notes on the music sheet.

Since each different type of sensory information reaches your brain at a different time, your brain must work to synchronize all of this information.

Second, when playing music, things happen at different speeds and time scales and must line up precisely. Music is also a way that we express our identities: the music we play, or even listen to, can be a way of telling the world, our peers, our parents, and our friends something about who we are. In cultures that do not use writing, singers often hold an important place in society, because they memorize important things like history and family relationships.

For example, in the late s rap music artists were arrested for performances that authorities thought were hostile and disrespectful. While you might think of singing a song or playing an instrument as a special activity that you do only at certain times, you should also notice that music and musical sounds fill our lives.

Music is played on speakers and sometimes played live, and we can hear music in most public places, on buses, in elevators, and in restaurants. Many of us listen to music through our phones or in our cars as well. Our lives are truly full of music, and so our relationship to music can have a big effect on a lifetime of learning.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We would like to thank those who assisted in the translation of the articles in this Collection to make them more accessible to kids outside English-speaking countries, and for the Jacobs Foundation for providing the funds necessary to translate the articles. For this article, we would especially like to thank Nienke van Atteveldt and Sabine Peters for the Dutch translation.

The Anthropology of Music. Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neurophysiological basis. The participants were asked to identify whether a sound from a musical instrument, the environment or a human was the same, and whether it came from the same direction, as the previous one they heard. Musicians remembered the type of sound faster, while both bilinguals and musicians identified its location more accurately than the other group.

Bilinguals performed the same in the first test as those who only spoke one language, but they still showed less brain activity when completing the task. Royal Ballet. Zattore agrees. There are experiments that show that changes are greater if you begin musical training by about the age of seven. Here we run up against a kind of chicken-and-egg problem. But as listeners, why do humans enjoy music? This is an area of particular interest to Zattore. For one of his experiments, he asked people to bring recordings of music they especially enjoy to his laboratory.

But what they all had in common was that they showed activity in the dopamine system. On the other hand, there appear to be some listeners who genuinely enjoy this music. So what does brain science have to say about this debate? Not a lot, as it turns out. But with a little prodding, a few scientific ideas emerge.

Consonant intervals assume structural roles. Patel proposes a kind of experiment that might be done to shed some light on the issue. And one of the things that influences the way people use their brains is culture. Or is cultural bias the skeleton in the closet of brain science? Ethnomusicologists have been saying for a long time that there are few universals. But certain things are widespread. The belief that music makes us smarter is no modern philosophy.

While the claim caused significant controversy in the scientific community after results were unable to be replicated, the public embraced the idea, with entire commercial enterprises cropping up on the basis that listening to Mozart made you smarter. But is putting on some Mozart prior to your final exams or next meeting really a trustworthy path to intellectual success? Well, according to science: probably not. Dr Frances Rauscher, who conducted the experiment, has stressed that the findings extend to only spatial-temporal reasoning, and not to general intelligence, as has been suggested in the media and popular culture.

However, the notion that music is related to brain development is not without merit — various studies have shown that there is a correlation between children who consistently practise music and increased cognitive function in specific neurological areas.

Similarly, Rauscher, who conducted the Mozart Effect study, conducted a separate experiment which trained a group of pre-school children aged 3—4 on the keyboard over a 6-month period. However, these effects were observed only 24 hours after the discontinuation of the keyboard training, as the study was not continued, and thus long-term effects were untested.