writing skills.” The children’s neuroarchitecture changed in a way that
boosts both motor skills (writing) and auditory skills (word recognition)—
direct improvements in language processing. Ten-year-olds who have been
practicing a musical instrument for at least three years see a boost in both
their vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills over children who don’t.
Kids who start music lessons prior to first grade show superior sensory-
motor integration when they are adults. These findings alone make a strong
case for parents starting music lessons before age 7.
Musical training provides direct improvements in working memory, not
only in the phonological loop but also in the visuospatial sketch pad (see the
Miguel Najdorf story in the Memory chapter for more on that).
Working
memory is a key constituent of executive function. Executive function
predicts students’ future undergraduate performances better than their SAT
scores, or even their IQs. Selecting and focusing on relevant stimuli from a
host of choices is also a component of executive function. Any assistance
music provides in this domain (and helping students pick out specific
auditory streams in a room filled with irrelevant noise is one big example)
is probably a good thing for kids.
Taken together, these studies make
a case for supporting music
education. In the journal
Nature Reviews Neuroscience,
researchers Nina
Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran write of the studies on listening: “The
beneficial effects of music training on sensory processing confer advantages
beyond music processing itself. This argues
for an improvement in the
quality and quantity of music training in schools.”
Music to Ray Vizcarra’s ears, no doubt.
The link between speech and music
Why would music training benefit speech? We know that music and speech
are not processed identically in the human brain. But we also know they
share many common features.
Take rhythm, for one. People can speak in a pulsed pattern, as when
reading a Shakespearean play, or a poem, or a rap. As any drummer will tell
you, rhythm is very much a
part of the musical experience, too.
Take pitch, for another. When people are finished speaking a sentence,
the pitch of their voice invariably lowers. When people ask a question, their
voice invariably rises. Pitch variation is a key part of speech. It is also one
of the signature hallmarks of music.
Music processing in the brain may, I believe, be conceptually likened to
a Venn diagram, where two circles partially overlap to create a shared
region. The brain has regions that are speech-specific. Call it the red
domain. And the brain has regions that are music-specific. Call it the blue
domain. But speech and music also share some regions in common—
psychologically and physiologically. With apologies to Alice Walker, color
it purple.
The brain keeps its separate
regions quite separate, as we know from
cases like Monica, a Canadian nurse who suffers from a condition called
congenital amusia. Monica can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Neither can many
members of her family.
Her condition, however, is not just that she can’t
match the pitch she hears in a song. Studies show that Monica cannot
discriminate between notes. She literally can’t tell one note from the other,
can’t determine if one is “sour” compared to another, can’t detect melodic
patterns of any kind. With respect to music, she is completely tone-deaf.
Monica does not enjoy listening to music. It appears to be a source of stress,
as perhaps her schoolmates could attest: Monica
was in her church choir
and school band as a little girl.
You would never know that Monica has pitch discrimination issues if
you struck up a conversation with her, however. She speaks just like the rest
of us. Her voice goes down when she finishes a declarative sentence (she’s
no Valley Girl), and her voice goes up when she is finished with a question.
Monica can detect these changes in pitch, in both her voice and the voice of
anyone else.
In another case of amusia, a child attempted piano lessons. His
instructor soon found he could not discriminate between two pitches (and
also could not keep time). When it came to speech, though, it was a
different story. He fluently spoke three languages besides his native tongue.
It seems odd that people can detect pitch
changes when their brains
decide they are listening to
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
