Brain Rules and Music Lessons

I've just finished reading a book by John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby.

I love reading good books.  In fact, if you are interested in learning with any age of child, you should read this.  My children are 2 and 4, but reading about their brains from infancy gives me the insight to see where they have been, and what I can do now based on that understanding.

My favorite insight in this book: "the brain seeks security above all." Medina offers an entire chapter about the importance of the parents' relationship to the developing child.  In another chapter, he makes an analogy to the victim of assault who can remember the weapon perfectly, but not the perpetrator's face.  "The brain is learning under these hostile conditions (stress can marvelously focus the mind); it is just concentrating on the source of the threat." 

Weapons focus also occurs during lessons:  Medina tells about a flight student who is struggling during a flight.  The teacher begins to yell at her, hoping to boost her concentraion.  Instead, she starts to cry, and the teacher has to land the plane.  "The teacher's anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger.  The teacher was the source of danger."

Here's the part of the book that is relevant to music lessons 

10 years of music lessons

"There's another powerful way to fine-tune a child's hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training.  Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids--those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7--responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby's cry.  The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby's cry, all the while eavesdropping on the musician's brainstem (the most ancient part of the brain) to see what happened.

Kids without rigorous musical training didn't show much discrimination at all. They didn't pick up on the fine-grained information embedded in the signal and were, so to speak, more emotionally tone deaf.  Dana Strait, first author of the study, wrote:  'That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we'd expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings.'

This finding is remarkably clear, beautifully practical, and a bit unexpected.  It suggests that if you want happy kids later in life, get them started on a musical journey early in life.  Then make sure they stick with it until they are old enough to start filling out their applications to Harvard, probably humming all the way."