Yet More Science Backs Musical Education as a Path to Better Brains

Society ditches music education as its own peril. This is the subtext of a study released yesterday connecting increased activity in the regions of the brain connected to executive functioning, according to functional MRI scans, and the presence of early-childhood musical training. Simply: Learning music at a young age would seem to result in smarter individuals, an effect that persists well beyond childhood, according to the study. Executive functioning is, basically, what could be considered "sharpness." Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child puts it like this: "Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways," where the air traffic control system is EF. The new study's authors, led by Dr. Nadine Gaab of Boston Children's Hospital, note that EF is an even stronger indicator of academic success than IQ, while poor EF is an impairment commonly seen in children with ADHD and in elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer's. (Music could one day be a treatment for both.) EF is also something that can be tracked using scans, as it's linked to increased activity in several distinct regions of the brain: the supplementary motor area, the pre-area, and the right cortex. fMRI scans are hardly definitive or even meaningful on their own, and the subjects were all subject to batteries of other cognitive evaluations, including standard IQ tests. Additionally, the study controlled for such intervening factors as parental education, job status, and family income, all things that have their own demonstrated and potentially distorting correlations to executive functioning. The Boston researchers compared a group of 15 musically-trained children, ages nine to 12, with a control group of 12 untrained children of the same age range. They also compared a group of 15 adult professional musicians to a control group with no musical training. (The trained children played for 5.2 years and practiced 3.7 hours per week, starting at the age of 5.9, on average.) All were tested using a variety of different tasks relating to different sorts of brain activity, while being scanned