Can Music Enhance Brain Functioning and Academic Learning?

A study on the relationship between spatial task performance and music lead to the discovery of the Mozart effect. This refers to the study’s discoveries that listening to Mozart for ten minutes can augment a person’s spatial-temporal intellect. However, many people often ask, ‘Why Mozart?’ Well, in the study to discover the link between music education and the brain, Shaw, a researcher, attends a lecture and learns how brains transmit neural messages. He then formulates a theory (long and difficult mathematical model) on how the cerebral cortex organizes neural impulses into patterns. According to this theory, the brain’s neurons contain particular natural shooting patterns which act as an in-house neural language. These patterns can undergo mapping and alteration through education and practice. Also, there are various reports and articles one can get from cheap resume services to understand the relationship between music and the brain.

In research on the studies on music and learning, a set of students had three arrays of standard IQ spatial cognitive tasks. Ten-minute-long listening conditions came before these tasks. One task entails paying attention to Mozart Sonata; another consists listening to a slackening tape; and the final one involves being in ten minutes of quietness. According to the study on how music affects the brain, the effects show that paying attention to Mozart gives people a unique benefit in relation to spatial task performance. Students tend to perform better on spatial intellectual tests after paying attention to Mozart in comparison to listening to a slackening tape or being in silence. Music conditions differ in a significant manner from the quietness and the slackening conditions. Nonetheless, paying attention to Mozart’s piano sonata raises spatial cognitive test scores. Contrariwise, the effects of music on learning are not long-term. According to Shaw and Rauscher (another researcher), the increasing effect of the music state is sequential, and it does not go past the ten to fifteen minute period when subjects involve each spatial task.

The researchers went on to cite numerous sources inquiring for extensive research. Could the Mozart effect undergo optimization by fluctuating the amount of time people spend listening to it? Could listening to Mozart also enhance other acumen or intellect measures, for instance, verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and short-term memory? What are the effects of other types of music would have on one’s IQ performance? Answers and responses to these questions were unclear. So, this leads the academic researchers from  writemyessayforme.co.uk to conjecture or postulate that music lacking in intricacy or repetitive music would fail to boost performance. They had a presumption or belief that the intricacy and maybe the mathematical meticulousness of Mozart’s song was behind its increasing effect.

Shaw’s cumulative theory on music studies on the brain states that there are chronological, anecdotal, and correlational affiliations between music cognizance and intuitions about theoretical operations like spatial or mathematical thinking was a sound reservation. But, the media came to seize it. Later, its transformation was like a gossip, that Mozart can make one brighter or smarter. Beyond these researchers’ first study, there have been numerous studies to examine further how music stimulates the brain.

The relationship between music and academic learning

A study on how music affects learning by Lamb and Gregory shows that students who attain high scores on pitch discrimination show good reading performance, and they perform well on phonemic awareness. These researchers did not state that the inability to distinguish pitch differences in students does indeed causes enhancements in reading performance. To establish this relationship, it was necessary to conduct extensive research to track the progress of student’s reading over time and isolate exercise in pitch differentiation from other music talents. If one can meet these conditions, it would be easy to establish an actual causal relationship between reading ability and musical training. With this stipulation, Lamb and Gregory came to the conclusion that the academic repercussion which would follow is that structuring musical training in a careful manner is a fundamental component in education. Extensive studies showing the relationship between the brain and music training.

Keyboard lessons boost temporal-spatial task performance in pre-students

Various additional studies explore how particular types of disclosure to music influence the brain. According to Joel Donnelly, content writer of essaykitchen, knowing how to sing as well as play the keyboard can affect the temporal-spatial abilities of preschool students. In his research, a group of children (ranging between three to five years) had keyboard or singing lessons. A control group entailing fifteen students had no lessons on music. Nonetheless they had similar pre-school undertakings.

According to the findings, preschoolers who had week-to-week keyboard lessons had a significant improvement in their temporal-spatial skills than the group of preschoolers who receive group singing or computer lessons. Furthermore, according to memory researchers, the effects were long-term.

Sequencing music training in complexity enhances Match Scores

Another study by Martin F. Gardiner shows that the Kodaly method, a specific type of musical training – incorporating learning to sing songs and rhythm games developing to particular growth toward greater complexity, affects the match skills of first and second graders in a positive manner. Additionally, students who receive special musical training perform well in reading than their equivalents – those using computers. And in Math, they were better than their peers despite starting behind them.

Irrespective of Gardiner’s study demonstrating how playing music affects the brain by sequencing music in relation to a development in intricacy and the progression of math abilities in elementary school students, he is cautious enough to ensure not to overemphasize music’s exclusivity in developing abilities which shift from topic to topic. Gardiner presumes that people can use other skills, besides musical skills, in other disciplines.

The brain’s structure and early musical training

Numerous studies state that starting music training early enough correlates with more significant development in some parts of the brain, for instance, the planum temporale (part of left hemisphere responsible for perfect pitch). Musicians with perfect pitch have a bigger planum temporale than non-musicians. These studies reveal that the musicians began music lessons at an early age. Thus, this leads to the discovery that music improves brain function when people start music training early.

Is more music needed in schools?

In conclusion, there are various ways through which music enhances learning, and placing it in schools is an ideal option. According to the above discoveries, music helps improve and develop the skills of many students at a young age. Additionally, the majority tend to perform better than their counterparts in control groups. Thus, the place of brain-enhancing music in educational institutions should not be put to a halt. Instead, there ought to be many means and methods to students learn music training at an early age.