Music is something pretty well all of us enjoy. Regardless of our preferred genre(s), it is relatively safe to say that just about all of us have listened to music at some point in time, and for those of who don’t, I find it a tad weird, but no judgment.
While most of us enjoy the sound of music, there are far fewer of us who can read music, and further create it with an instrument. I was fortunate enough to have learned how to play piano via lessons for several years when I was younger. I stopped playing for roughly ten years and was curious to see if I could still play, and while rusty at first, it didn’t take me too long to recall the muscle memory of some of my favourite jams I used to crank out on the ivory.
I’ve always had a significant amount of respect for music, and further, for those who can create, understand, and read it. And, unsurprisingly, musical training is quite advantageous for the brain, especially from a young age, explains an article from The Good News Network.
“Neurologists looking to understand how perfect pitch affects the brain found an altogether different and inspiring conclusion about music and brain function.
“They found that both perfect pitch—the ability to identify a note simply by the sound—and musical training in general led to greater functional connectivity between the regions of the brain.
“Using state-of-the-art methods of assessing the synchronized activity between brain hemispheres and regions, Simon Leipold and the other researchers found ‘robust effects of musicianship in inter-and intrahemispheric connectivity in both structural and functional networks,'” the article explains.
Through a trial that took “153 female and male participants; 52 perfect pitch musicians, 51 non-perfect pitch musicians, and 50 non-musicians” into consideration, the researchers “…found that musical training at a young age produces stronger structural connections—as in, connections that help distinct areas of the brain work together to perform complex cognitive tasks—which has important implications outside of musical education,” according to the article.
“Leipold and the team have unknowingly produced a very strong case for musical education in schools, as their finding of structural connections is nothing trivial. Rather, it’s one of the most important metrics of brain health and development,” says the article.
If you have ever contemplated taking up music, I hope this information can be the final dose of encouragement needed to pursue it.
ontheedgeofeverything 