Can Making Music Remake The Mind?

By Chris Berdik/The Hechinger Report

Music education advocates have been fighting back against school budget cuts by claiming that that learning music makes kids better at learning other things.

Numerous studies have found that students who play an instrument tend to do better in school across a wide range of subjects, but not everyone agrees that music instruction is the reason they do better. It's not clear whether music training sharpens the learning mind or if smarter and self-motivated kids are more likely to start (and stick with) music training in the first place - the classic causation versus correlation conundrum.

In a September 2021 book Of Sound Mind (MIT Press), Northwestern auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus makes the case that budding musicians enjoy real brain gains that help them achieve beyond the school orchestra.

The book covers a broad sweep of Kraus's decades-long investigation into the hearing brain at her Brainvolts lab at Northwestern University, including two longitudinal studies of students in real world music classes who showed improved language and reading skills that tracked with changes in their brain functioning compared to control group students.

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