I wasn’t making it up! There it is on the fMRI – musicians have several areas of the brain that are bigger, including the corpus callosum.
What’s the corpus callosum? It connects the two hemispheres of the neocortex and when it’s bigger and doing it’s job better, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I take it its somewhat like a muscle.
Did you ever talk with someone when you could almost feel them switching gears, or they couldn’t follow you at all?
Say you were talking about the numbers then switched to a metaphor. Some people can’t follow the train of thought from something analytical and linear to something NOT. That’s the corpus callosum, which, incidentally is generally bigger in women, and why women can talk (neocortex) about their feelings (reptilian and limbic), are better at empathy, and can multi-task more easily.
However, the door swings both way. The fact that it’s smaller in men, and less functional, is probably what allows men to maintain narrow focus, and also, perhaps, handle stress better. That’s my theory anyway.
The new brain imaging shows that what goes on “out here” really changes things in the brain. People who’d learned music (not just listened to it), also had larger primary motor cortex and cerebellum (movement and coordination).
Learning to play an instrument used to be part of the good education. It was part of mine – piano lessons from age 6 til I escaped to college. My mother would say, “I want you to be exposed to things.” When I had my own sons, I followed suit. Indiscriminately I exposed them to good things — dance, sports, music, art, poetry, drama, travel. I observed what “took” with them. How would a budding pianist know they were one if never exposed to a piano?
One theory is that learning music “beefs up brain circuitry.” “For example,” say the BrainScience people, “a larger area in the section of the brain that brings music and speech into conscious experience, the auditory cortex, is responsive to piano tones in adult[s] compared with nonmusicians.” Learning music made little welcome receptors in the brain that non-players don’t have.
This really hit home to me because I work with a lot of middle-aged people in transition, and life is a process of finding new sources of pleasure. If you have never been exposed to piano tones, that feeling of pleasure is not there to go back to when, say, barhopping has lost its thrill.
So far the only direct evidence of better performance is musically-trained adults perform better on word memory tests. It’s also been shown to have some advantages in preschoolers.
Expose your kids to lots of things, but don’t leave yourself out. Our brains keep growing for a long time. In fact studies show there’s a big surge around age 60.
For the research, go here:
http://web.sfn.org/content/Publications/BrainBriefings/music_training_and_brain.htm
Susan Dunn, MA, Marketing Coach,
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