Re-Wire Your Brain with Musical Learning

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If you want to enhance your memory functions, and give your brain an all-over workout, you should come to us for lessons and practice your ukulele regularly.

Don’t take our word for it. Look at what the neuroscientists have to say:

This information is taken from a brilliant Ted Ed original:
How playing an instrument benefits your brain – Anita Collins
When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What’s going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians’ brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

Transcript:
Did you know that every time a musician picks up their instrument, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? On the outside they may look calm and focussed, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required, but inside their brain, there’s a party going on.
How do we know this?

Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time, with instruments like FMRI and PET scanners. When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks such as reading or doing math problems, each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together to make into a unified musical experience. And our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along. But when science turned from observing the brains of music listeners, to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full body workout. The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated and astonishingly fast sequences. But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? The research is still fairly new but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once. Especially the visual, auditory and motor cortises. As with any other workout, disciplined structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it, is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision in which the left hemisphere is involved with the novel and creative content that the right excells in. For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more creatively in both academic and social settings. Because making music crafting and understanding it’s emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function. A category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategising and attention to detail, and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And indeed musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions. Creating, storing and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag an audio tag and a contextual tag, like a good internet search engine. So how do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to, say, sports or painting. Or could it be that people who go into music are already smarter to begin with? Neuroscientists have explored these issues. So far they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity study, including other arts, and several randomised studies of participants, who show the same level of cognitive and neural processing at the start, found that those exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain Source

Live in London? Want to play/improve your ukulele playing? See what we can offer you here.

Neuroscientists Say Musicians Brains Do It Better

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A brilliant Ted Ed original:
How playing an instrument benefits your brain – Anita Collins

When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What’s going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians’ brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

Transcript:

Did you know that every time a musician picks up their instrument, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? On the outside they may look calm and focussed, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required, but inside their brain, there’s a party going on.

How do we know this?

Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time, with instruments like FMRI and PET scanners. When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks such as reading or doing math problems, each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together to make into a unified musical experience. And our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along. But when science turned from observing the brains of music listeners, to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full body workout. The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated and astonishingly fast sequences. But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? The research is still fairly new but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once. Especially the visual, auditory and motor cortices. As with any other workout, disciplined structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it, is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision in which the left hemisphere is involved with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more creatively in both academic and social settings. Because making music crafting and understanding it’s emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function. A category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategising and attention to detail, and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And indeed musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions. Creating, storing and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag an audio tag and a contextual tag, like a good internet search engine. So how do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to, say, sports or painting. Or could it be that people who go into music are already smarter to begin with? Neuroscientists have explored these issues. But so far they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity study, including other arts, and several randomised studies of participants, who show the same level of cognitive and neural processing at the start, found that those exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain. So how do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to, say, sports or painting. Or could it be that people who go into music are already smarter to begin with? Neuroscientists have explored these issues. But so far they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity study, including other arts, and several randomised studies of participants, who show the same level of cognitive and neural processing at the start, found that those exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain.