Music Instruction Aids Verbal Memory
2003-07-29
Washington -- Those dreaded piano lessons pay off in unexpected ways:
According to a new study, children with music training had significantly
better verbal memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus,
the longer the training, the better the verbal memory.
These findings underscore how, when experience changes a specific brain
region, other skills that region supports may also benefit –- a kind of
cognitive side effect that could help people recovering from brain injury as
well as healthy children. The research appears in the July issue of
Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological
Association. Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90
boys between age six and 15. Half had musical training as members of their
school's string orchestra program, plus lessons in playing classical music
on Western instruments, for one to five years. The other 45 participants
were schoolmates with no musical training. The researchers, led by Agnes S.
Chan, Ph.D., gave the children verbal memory tests, to see how many words
they recalled from a list, and a comparable visual memory test for images.
Students with musical training recalled significantly more words than the
untrained students, and they generally learned more words with each
subsequent trial of three. After 30-minute delays, the trained boys also
retained more words than the control group. There were no such differences
for visual memory. What's more, verbal learning performance rose in
proportion to the duration of musical training.
Thus, the authors say, even fewer than six years of musical training can
boost verbal memory. More training, they add, may be even better because of
a "greater extent of cortical reorganization in the left temporal region."
In other words, the more that music training stimulates the left brain, the
better that side can handle other assigned functions, such as verbal
learning. It's like cross training for the brain, comparable perhaps to how
runners find that stronger legs help them play tennis better – even though
they began wanting only to run. Similarly, says Chan, "Students with better
verbal memory probably will find it easier to learn in school."
Chan, along with Yim-Chi Ho, M.Phil., and Mei-Chun Cheung, Ph.D.,
followed up a year later with the 45 orchestra students. Thirty-three boys
were still in the program; nine had dropped out fewer than three months
after the first study. The authors now compared a third group of 17 children
who had started music training after the initial assessment. This beginner's
group initially had shown significantly lower verbal-learning ability than
the more musically experienced boys. However, one year later, these newer
students again showed significant improvement in verbal learning.
On the other hand, unlike the music students who stuck it out, the
dropouts showed no further improvement. However, although the beginners and
the continued-training groups tended to improve significantly, there was one
consolation for the dropouts: At least they didn't backtrack. After a year,
they didn't lose the verbal memory advantage they had gained prior to
stopping lessons.
Ho, Cheung and Chan propose that music training during childhood is a
kind of sensory stimulation that "somehow contributes to the
reorganization-better development of the left temporal lobe in musicians,
which in turn facilitates cognitive processing mediated by that specific
brain area, that is, verbal memory." They contrast their evidence with
inconclusive reports that listening to Mozart improves spatiotemporal
reasoning, which most researchers have been unable to replicate. At the same
time, Chan notes that it's too simplistic to divide brain functions (such as
music) strictly into left or right, because "our brain works like a network
system, it is interconnected, very co-operative and amazing."
Most important, the authors say, "the [current] findings suggest that
specific experience might affect the development of memory in a predictable
way in accordance with the localization of brain functions. … Experience
might affect the development of cognitive functions in a systematic
fashion." More research is needed, but knowledge of this mechanism can
"stimulate further investigation into ways to enhance human brain
functioning and to develop a blueprint for cognitive rehabilitation, such as
using music training to enhance verbal memory."
Article: "Music Training Improves Verbal but Not Visual Memory:
Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Explorations in Children," Yim-Chi Ho,
M.Phil.; Mei-Chun Cheung, Ph.D.; and Agnes S. Chan, Ph.D.; The Chinese
University of Hong Kong; Neuropsychology, Vol. 17, No. 3.
Source: American Psychological Association
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