23 July, 2015:
A research at the beginning of the 20th century, standardized assessments of IQ and musical ability suggested that the two were correlated and it was thought that participation in musical training could improve IQ.
Musical training has shown improvements in a wide variety of different skills like memory or spatial learning. Musicians are also more adept at processing speech in unfavorable environments or environments with large amount of background noise.
Recent advances in technologies have also allowed researchers to probe into the neural underpinnings of these adaptations.
A new study which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has shown the result of musical training on the brain. Neuro-physiological methods were adopted to measure the subcortical and cortical responses to speech in the brains of two groups of adolescents in a high school in the Chicago area. One group took part in group musical training and one group took part in a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programme.
The method allowed Adam Tierney, the lead researcher, and his colleagues to assess how their participants’ brains encoded speech before and after three years of taking part in the two different types of training.
Adolescence is the period where the brain is not fully developed and specific areas are yet to mature. This is what made this an interesting age to do these tests.
The result showed that both groups made improvements in all of the language/speech tasks, but the degree of improvement was larger in the phonological awareness task for the group who had undergone musical training. Through this, the researchers were
able to measure the usual time course of changes that occurred at this stage in development and assess any alterations due to participation in either the music training or officer training. Those who participated in musical training, the period of time during which regions of the brain responsible for the auditory processing were developing was extended in comparison to those that did the officer training. The musically trained groups also showed an accelerated time course for reaching adult cortical development. Now, this result has clearly suggested that the participation in musical training can accelerate brain development.
Music could definitely provide a enjoyable background that could help improve language skills in children around the world. Not only language skill but other skills as well since musical training improves the brain development. However, it is important to notice that musical training was shown to produce benefits for the phonological awareness language tasks but for the other two tests of phonological memory and rapid naming, no differences between the two groups of adolescents was found.
