Does Music Make You Smarter?

Does Music Make You Smarter?

Rameka Sahadeo

University of Missouri-Kansas City

American music education is at a turning point in its history, and poised for a modern renaissance. After decades of budgetary neglect as an “elective,” music is reasserting itself thanks to a growing body of scientific data that shows how vital it is to a student’s success in all academic areas. Research is showing that music isn't only a social trend; it also has a biological and neurological basis. It is said that music is hard-wired into human brains and that it has existed from the early days of humankind, possibly even predating language. Current research, together with expanding knowledge about music's role and influence on cognitive development, learning, and wellness provides will lead to expanded opportunities for all people to be engaged in music and experience is vast, and proven benefits.

Human music, like human language, is complex, governed by rules, and acquired in developmental stages, with all individuals acquiring a basic musical appreciation, and others going on to develop remarkably high skills. “Such evidence suggests that music is a consequence of biological evolution and is therefore associated with specific brain architecture. Music can evidently trigger physical changes in the brain's wiring. By measuring faint magnetic fields emitted by the brains of professional musicians, has shown that intensive practice of an instrument leads to discernible enlargement of parts of the cerebral cortex, the layer of gray matter most closely associated with higher brain function” (Lemonick 2003).

In 2001 scientists from North America and the United Kingdom gathered to discuss the “Musical Brain” (i.e.: the relationship between music and brain function). At the conference, researchers presented the increasing evidence that music is not merely a cultural trend but a biological fact of human life. “As demonstrated by infants who are too young for even informal music training, yet distinguish consonance from dissonance and recognize tunes even when their timing or pitch has been altered” (Doughty 2001).

Even though scientists have yet to pinpoint the exact relationship between the brain and music, there is concrete evidence that proves that music does improve spatial-temporal reasoning. We distinguish two types of reasoning: spatial temporal and language-analytic. Both types of reasoning are crucial to how we think, reason, and create; in general, we go back and forth between the two. Language-analytical reasoning would be more involved when we solve equations and obtain a quantitative result. Spatial-temporal would be involved in chess when we have to think ahead several moves. “Some key reasoning features used in spatial-temporal reasoning are: the transforming and relating of mental images in space and time, symmetries of the inherent cortical firing patterns used to compare physical and mental images, and natural temporal sequences of those inherent cortical patterns” (Grandin 1998). For centuries people have pondered the similarities among such higher brain functions as music, mathematics, and chess. In their model of higher brain function, Grandin, Peterson and Shaw proposed a causal link between music and spatial-temporal reasoning. The model was developed from the trion model, a highly structured mathematical idea; with the column acting as the basic neuronal network in the cortex. The column makes-up subunit minicolumns, or the trions. “A columnar network of trions has a large repertoire of inherent quasi-stable, periodic spatial-temporal firing patterns, which can be excited and used in memory and higher brain function. Those inherent memory-firing patterns evolve over time in a probabilistic manner, from one to another, in natural sequences related by specific symmetries, and form the common neural language of the cortex. The results were striking when evolutions of the trion model firing patterns were mapped onto various pitches and instruments producing recognizable styles of music.