Over the past several days, we have talked about how music affects and is interpreted by our brains. Music helps build community, helps us bond to one another, and helps us to regulate our emotions. On this final day, I wanted to discuss how music can help us heal and change our brains.
As you likely know, our brain stores and organizes information for us that helps us get through life. There are portions of the brain that are specifically dedicated to mathematics, language, vision, hearing, memory, and movement which light up in an MRI or PET scan. But there is no dedicated section to process music. Rather, when neuroscientists look at someone’s brain as they are listening to music, the whole brain lights up. Listening to music is a whole-brain activity.
If passively listening to music can do this, what can playing music do? It turns out that learning and practicing an instrument is a “full-body workout” to the brain because it engages nearly every portion. It combines analytical tasks (the left brain’s forte) with creative tasks (the strength of the right brain), which means that the brain hemispheres are communicating back and forth a lot more, strengthening that bridge between them, the corpus callosum.
Practicing an instrument also has some interesting implications for those of us with ADHD, who have a smaller and therefore less functional executive cognitive control, which includes memory, organizational, and motivational tasks as well as emotional and impulse control. Playing music also strengthens and connects this area, the frontal lobe of the brain, and musicians have been found to have better memories and also can access their memories more quickly.
There have been several studies done on people who were originally found to possess similar neural functioning and IQ. When a group of those participants were allowed to learn to play music, they had increased brain function in many areas, whereas the control group (those who did not learn an instrument) had relatively the same brain function at both the beginning and end of the study. And playing music seems to have more ability to improve brain function over other creative arts.
Exposing children to learning an instrument before the age of seven seems to have a positive effect on their problem-solving skills throughout their lives, but playing an instrument in old age is a great benefit, too. As a bit of anecdotal evidence, my mother has a friend who had a stroke, and when she recovered, she had to relearn piano. Now, you can’t tell that the woman ever had a stroke. I hope this is incentive to my own mother to continue practicing piano daily.
And to end this series, I would like to introduce you to Derrick Paravicini, who has autism and a severe developmental disability. He is also blind. But he was so fascinated by music, that he learned to play the piano. He has perfect pitch, and can even tell you what key the train engine is running in. He can also play most songs after having only heard them once. His cognition and development may be limited, but what parts of his brain cannot be used for their original function have been filled with music, and it’s really the most amazing thing. Please listen to and enjoy this video of piano requests, and as you do, please read in the description about his life. And I hope this will encourage you to pick up an instrument and play.
