Playing Music Makes You Smart

Scientists have found concrete evidence that playing music can increse the brain power and sharpen the hearing sounds including speech.

Experience with music appears to help with many other things in life, potentially transferring to activities like reading or picking up nuances in tones of voices or hearing sounds in a noisy classroom better," researcher Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

These new findings highlights the importance of music classes. Kraus said "It is a mistake to cut music classes when the budget is tight for school."

Experiments started with 20 adult volunteers, who watched and listened to a movie of their choice. "'Men in Black,' 'The Incredibles,' 'Best in Show' were favorites," Kraus said.

During the experiment neural responses from the volunteers were recorded. Half of the volunteers have six years of experience with musical instrument and other half had three years of experience or less.

As they watched movies, the volunteers also listened to Mandarin words that sounded like "mi" continuously at conversation level in the background. Mandarin is a tone language, where a single word can differ in meaning depending on its tone "Even with their attention focused on the movie and though the sounds had no linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians," said neuroscientist Patrick Wong at Northwestern University.

It was concluded that their brain power and hearing capability were increased. Kraus said " It is yet to be found out how much music will be helpful to people and how music will be helpful to eradicate literacy problems.