New Research Links Music Study and Increased Brain Size New research findings that show playing a musical instrument increases the size of the sound-processing area of the brain were published in the April 23 issue of Nature magazine. Neuroscientist Christo Pantev and colleagues at the University of Muenster in Germany used magnetic source imaging to compare the brains of skilled musicians and people who have never played a musical note. They discovered that the musicians' auditory cortex, which responds to pitching a sound on a piano, was about 25 percent larger than their non-musical counterparts. The researchers also found that the younger the musicians began their training, the more the cortex developed. Pantev told the Reuters News Service in April that the brain processes acoustic stimuli, such as musical notes on a piano, as so-called tonotopic maps. Neurones--cells that transmit nerve impulses-- are grouped together on the maps in the brain according to pitch. But because musical tones are different from ordinary sounds, more neurons are needed to process the more complicated notes. A musician's training develops the area of the brain in a different way. More neurones are involved and are working more harmoniously, which Pantev said could explain how young musicians develop such extraordinary talent. The more experienced musicians had larger tonotopic maps. The study supports earlier research that showed a difference in the part of the brain controlling the left and right hand fingers of string musicians. "We found that the representation of the fingers of the left hand are bigger than the representation of the fingers of the right hand," Pantev told Reuters. Music makes us smarter According to research conducted at the University of California at Irvine. The positive effect of music has been understood for a long time. Plato once said that music "is a more potent instrument than any other for education." Now scientists know why. According to Newsweek magazine, music trains the brain for higher forms of thinking. Researchers at the UCI studied three year olds and found that after taking piano lessons and choir for 8 months, they became expert puzzle makers, scoring 80% higher than their playmates did in spatial intelligence. "Early music training can enhance a child's ability to reason'" says Irvine physicist Gordon Shaw. According to researchers these skills later translate into complex math and engineering skills. Shaw believes that as children listen to classical music they exercise their cortical neurons, which also strengthens circuits used for higher- order thinking skills. Einstein, who was a violinist, speaking about his theory of relativity said, "it occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. The discovery was the result of musical perception." For more information check out the UCI web site : http://www.musica.uci.edu Your Brain on Music Ongoing research shows that classical music is good for the brain: The cerebellum is larger in classically trained musicians than in people who don't play a musical instrument, Dr. Gottfried Schlaug of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston reported at the Society of Neuroscience convention in 1998. The cerebellum is a region of the brain responsible for posture, balance, coordination and fine motor movements. Research pursued at the University of California , Irvine , led by psychologist Frances Rauscher, Ph.D, and neuroscientist Gordon Shaw, Ph.D., shows that there is "an unmistakable causal link between music and spatial intelligence, reversing the once commonly held view that music education is irrelevant to intellectual development." In this study in the mid-1990s, researchers concluded that spatial- reasoning abilities are crucial for such higher brain function such as music, complex mathematics and chess. Results showed that the spatial-reasoning performance of 18 preschool children who took eight months of music lessons far exceeded the spatial reasoning of a demographically comparable group of 15 preschool children who went without music lessons. A similar study in the late '90s by Shaw and Rauscher showed that children who received piano training performed 34 percent higher on tests measuring spatial temporal ability than children instructed in computers. "It has been clearly documented that young students have difficulty understanding the concepts of proportion (used in math and science) and that no successful program has been developed to teach these concepts in the school system. The high proportion of children who saw dramatic improvements in spatial-temporal reasoning as a result of musical training should be of great interest to scientists and educators," the research team noted. Students who study music scored higher on both the verbal and math portions of the SAT than did non-music students, according to the College Entrance Examination Boards, as reported in Symphony, 1996.