Sunday, September 16, 2012

NY Times: Early Music Instruction Improves How We Hear & Learn

Check out this NY Times article printed last week discussing a study by researches at Northwestern University on how the brain responds to sound.  They determined that those music lessons you took when you were in elementary school will pay off even when you are 70!  Active engagement and disciplined study of music early on improves how your brain processes sound.

“To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections,” said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. “Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument.”

As you age, your previous music instruction has created "auditory processing skills that can help you understand speech against the background of a noisy environment." 

 http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/early-music-lessons-have-longtime-benefits/

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