What happens to a child’s brain when he studies music

Music is good for brain. Because it shapes it in a more integrated way, multiplying the connections. That’s why they favor it study of music, and a musical instrument, promises children to guarantee better school performance and in general a series of intangible benefits but quite evident from a neural point of view. A group of researchers fromuniversity of Zurich in fact explains in a studio that the musicians have so to speak “super connected” brains compared to someone who has never played an instrument.

Their findings reveal that people who start exercising from small (not just little geniuses, anyone) develop stronger connections than someone who starts playing later in life, or never starts. It is one of the ways that people’s experiences and practices can shape the brain and its intricate web of structural and functional connections. All this regardless of the fact that, explains the survey published on JNeurosci, the person shows off or not what is defined perfect pitch. That is, the innate ability to identify the absolute pitch (i.e. frequency) of a sound without the help of a reference instrument, such as the tuning fork.

Years of musical practice therefore shape the brain in a very profound way. And if a minority of musicians, including Mozart or Michael Jackson for example, possessed and still possess perfect pitch, the effects affect everyone. In the study, in fact, Simon Leipold, Carina Klein and Lutz Jäncke compared brain scans of 153 people, including 103 professional musicians, some with perfect pitch and some without, with those of 50 volunteers who were completely starved of music. To the surprise of the team no difference was noted between the brains of musicians with or without that quality – which for some it should more appropriately be called a gift – while, on the contrary, compared to those who do not play or have not studied music and practiced an instrument, both categories of musicians have shown a more marked functional connectivity, i.e., synchronized activity in the primary and secondary auditory regions in both hemispheres. Not only that: musicians have developed greater white matter connections between these regions, the primary and secondary auditory cortices, and the lobes involved in different types of high-level processes.

The point is which ones they had started playing as a child demonstrated stronger and more intense connections than those who picked up an instrument later in life. “These results – explains a press release from the Swiss university – show how much experience shapes the brain, especially in the first years of life, and to what extent advanced musical abilities are plastically represented in the brain”. On the absolute pitch and its effects, however, further investigations and even larger samples of volunteers are needed.