Music,
the universal language of mood, emotion and desire, connects with us through a
wide variety of neural systems.
We
now know from controlled treatment/outcome studies that listening to and
playing music is a potent treatment for mental health issues. 400 published
scientific papers have proven the old adage that “music is medicine.” In
fact, research demonstrates that adding music therapy to treatment improves
symptoms and social functioning among schizophrenics. Further,
music therapy has demonstrated efficacy as an independent treatment for
reducing depression, anxiety and chronic pain.
Importantly,
music education also appears to accelerate brain development in young
children, particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for processing
sound, language development, speech perception and reading skills, according to
initial results of a five-year study by USC neuroscientists.
The
Brain
and Creativity Institute (BCI) at USC began the five-year study in
2012, in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the
Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), to examine the impact of music instruction on
children’s social, emotional and cognitive development.
Their
initial study results show that music instruction speeds up the maturation of
the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency. The study,
published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive
Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music
education at a time when many schools around the United States and other
countries have either reduced or eliminated music and arts programs.
“We
are broadly interested in the impact of music training on cognitive,
socio-emotional and brain development of children,” said Assal Habibi, the
study’s lead author and a senior research associate at the BCI in the USC
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “These results reflect that
children with music training, compared with the two other comparison groups,
were more accurate in processing sound.”
For
this study, the neuroscientists monitored brain development and behavior in a
group of 37 children from underprivileged neighborhoods of Los
Angeles. Thirteen of the children, at 6 or 7 years old, began to receive
music instruction through the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program at HOLA. The
community music training program was inspired by the El Sistema method, one
that LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel had been in when he was growing
up in Venezuela.
Learning to Play
The
children learned to play instruments, such as the violin, in ensembles and
groups, and they practiced up to seven hours a week. The
researchers compared the budding musicians with peers in two other groups:
11 children in a community soccer program, and 13 children who are not involved
in any specific after-school programs. Several tools were used to monitor
changes in the children as they grew: MRI to monitor changes through brain
scans, EEG to track electrical activity in the brains, behavioral testing, and
other such techniques.
Within
two years of the study, the neuroscientists found the auditory systems of
children in the music program were maturing faster than in the other children.
This enhanced maturity reflects an increase in neuroplasticity, a
physiological change in the brain in response to its environment — in this
case, exposure to music and music instruction.
“The
auditory system is stimulated by music,” Habibi said. “This system is also
engaged in general sound processing that is fundamental to language
development, reading skills and successful communication.”
It
is believed the fine-tuning of the children’s auditory pathways could
accelerate their development of language and reading, as well as other
abilities — a potential effect which this group of neuroscientists
is continuing to study.
Ear to Brain
The
auditory system connects our ear to our brain to process sound. When we hear
something, our ears receive it in the form of vibrations that it converts into
a neural signal. That signal is then sent to the brainstem, up to the thalamus
at the center of the brain, and outward to its final destination, the primary
auditory cortex, located near the sides of the brain.
The progress of a child’s developing
auditory pathway can be measured by EEG, which tracks electrical signals, specifically
those referred to as “auditory evoked potentials.” In this study, the
scientists focused on an evoked potential called P1. They tracked amplitude — the
number of neurons firing — as well as latency — the speed that the
signal is transmitted. Both measures infer the maturity of the brain’s
auditory pathways.
As
children develop, both amplitude and the latency of P1 tend to decrease. This
means that that they are becoming more efficient at processing sound.
At
the beginning of the study and again two years later, the children completed a
task measuring their abilities to distinguish tone. As the EEG was recording
their electrical signals, they listened to violin tones, piano tones and
single-frequency (pure) tones played. The children also completed a tonal
and rhythm discrimination task in which they were asked to identify similar and
different melodies. Twice, they heard 24 melodies in randomized order and were
asked to identify which ones differed in tone and rhythm, and which were the
same in tone and rhythm.
Children
who were in the youth orchestra program were more accurate at detecting pitch
changes in the melodies than the other two groups. All three groups were able
to identify easily when the melodies were the same. However, children with
music training had smaller P1 potential amplitude compared to the other
children, indicating a faster rate of maturation.
“We
observed a decrease in P1 amplitude and latency that was the largest in the
music group compared to age-matched control groups after two years of
training,” the scientists wrote. “In addition, focusing just on the (second)
year data, the music group showed the smallest amplitude of P1 compared to both
the control and sports group, in combination with the accelerated development
of the N1 component.”
The Biology of Music
“Undeniably,
there is a biology of music,” according to Harvard University Medical School
neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo. He sees it as beyond question that there is
specialization within the brain for the processing of music. Music is a
biological part of life as surely as it is an aesthetic part.
Studies
as far back as 1990 found that the brain responds to harmony. Using a PET
scanner to monitor changes in neural activity, neuroscientists at McGill
University discovered that the part of the brain activated by music is
dependent on whether or not the music is pleasant or dissonant.
The
brain grows in response to musical training in the way a muscle responds to
exercise. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston
discovered that male musicians have larger brains than men who have not had
extensive musical training. The cerebellums, that part of the brain containing
70 percent of the total brain’s neurons, were 5 percent larger in expert male
musicians.
Researchers
have also found evidence of the power of music to affect neural activity no
matter where they looked in the brain, from primitive regions found in animals
to more recently evolved areas thought to be strictly human such as the frontal
lobes. Harmony, melody and rhythm invoke distinct patterns of brain activity.
