We’ve said it all along here at SparksofGenius.com: there are 9 intelligences, and if you want to get smarter you can work on any of them.
Scientists have completed a study that shows that musical training can strengthen your brain and help you interpret sounds better, be it music or speech.
You can read the article here: http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/070319_music_brainstem.html
How does this all happen? Neurogenesis!
It doesn’t take much training to make a difference. This is great news for anyone with a Learning Disability, especially Auditory difficulties such as:
- Auditory Discrimination
- Auditory Closure
- Auditory Figure-ground Discrimination
- Auditory Sequencing
- Auditory Association and Comprehension
Underachievement in school is a common indicator of a learning disability. If you, or someone you know, might have challenges in this area, visit www.SparksOfGenius.com and take the 30 Point Learning Assessment. It’s free and invaluable for uncovering your challenge areas.Be well and good luck!
Allen Dobkin
March 20th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
What’s important to me here is that PLAYING music stimulates the brain to improve hearing all kinds of sounds- even speech.
As an amateur musician who plays electric violin, I love the continuing stream of research from neuroscience that shows how important it is to use all of our brain and all of our many intelligences.
It is also fascinating to me that the part of the brain involved the brain stem, the so-called “primitive” part of the brain responsible for controlling automatic things like our breathing and heartbeat.
What’s clear is that we owe it to our children, our grandchildren and to ourselves to create, manifest and live in learning environments that are rich, complex, and novel. This means challenging ourselves to learn to do new things.
The researcher emphasized that the results were seen “in more or less everyday people. You don’t have to be a top musician to find these kinds of effects.”
So let’s move beyond the limitations we place on ourselves and learn something new, like facing the challenge of of blank piece of paper or finding “our” musical instrument.
Who knows part of the brain will be involved. For most of us, who cares.
Dr. Rohn