In Friday’s (1/9) Washington Post, Amy Ellis Nutt reports, “Music training not only helps children develop fine motor skills, but aids emotional and behavioral maturation as well, according to a new study, one of the largest to investigate the effects of playing an instrument on brain development. Using a database produced by the National Institutes of Health Magnetic Resonance (MRI) Study of Normal Brain Development, researchers at the University of Vermont College of Medicine analyzed the brain scans of 232 healthy children ages six to 18 specifically looking at brain development in children who play a musical instrument…. ‘What we found was the more a child trained on an instrument,’ said James Hudziak, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and director of the Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families, ‘it accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management and emotional control…. Everyone in our culture knows if I lift 5-pound, 10-pound, 15-pound weights, my biceps will get bigger. The same is true for the brain. We shouldn’t be surprised we can train the brain.’ Because the study’s participants were all mentally healthy children, Hudziak thinks the positive effect of music training on those who are not could be significant.”
Posted January 14, 2015
