sparkmygenius.com

Musical intelligence has been defined as the ability to think in sounds, rhythms, melodies and rhymes. At Sparks of Genius www.sparksofgenius.com we use a variety of musical software and experiences to optimize brain functioning in children and adults.

Nine years olds use an ear training game called “Pitch Invasion.” Teens play violins and flute. Adults sing along to old favorites like “Home on the Range” on an electronic keyboard.

We also encourage students young and old to take advantage of the brain benefits of whistling, humming, singing and dancing.

There is a study by Daniel Amen in Making a Good Brain Great about the effects of music and meditation on the brain.

Link here.

Kritan Kriya is a 12-minute meditation based on five sounds: saa, taa,naa, maa and aa. Meditators chant each sound as they consecutively touch their thumb to fingers two, three, four and five. This is repeated out loud for two minutes out loud, two minutes whispering, four minutes silently, two minutes whispering and two minutes out loud.

Afterwards, brain images called SPECT showed:
1) Marked decreases parietal lobe activity – less awareness of time and space
2) Increased pre-frontal cortex activity –facilitating inner awareness
3) Increased right temporal lobe activity – associated with spirituality.

Music is processed in the right temporal lobe – also called the “G-d spot” of the brain. No wonder it can increase spirituality. Of course it depends what music you listen to!

When faced with a difficult problem, Dr. Amen recommends playing music. He notes that music helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. When his writing got stuck, Jefferson played his violin to get the right words from his brain onto the paper.

Playing the violin also helped Albert Einstein solve complex problems.

At age 60, I was given a great present- an electric violin. When my brain gets stuck from too much multitasking in this crazybusy world of ours, I play different styles of music and learn new ones. Believe me, sparking musical intelligence benefits brain fitness.

Whether you sing, dance, hum, whistle, meditate or play an instrument, we can conclude that if you want to make your good brain great, exercise your musical intelligence. There are so many ways to do it. Have fun!

–Rohn Kessler, Ed. D.

There’s good news out there for folks who are looking to increase memory, stave off dementia, reduce the frequency of their “Senior Moments” and have fun doing it. What about training Attention (for Attention Deficit Disorder – ADD)?

In recent weeks, three new brain training games have arrived on store shelves, each one promising to give us neural networks of steel. There’s “Hot Brain” and “Practical Intelligence Quotient 2,” both playable on Sony’s handheld PSP. And then there’s “Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree” for Nintendo’s new Wii console.

Full article here.

But do these games really work?

Like most things in life, the answer is both yes and no. New and stimulating activities, including these video and puzzle games, can help you “use it” in lieu of “losing it.” So in that regard, yes they can help.

But once you’ve played a particular game enough times so that the activity is no longer novel, it loses some of its potency. In part this is addressed by offering a variety of games and puzzles. Ultimately, though, these games are not much better than the typical fare you can play online, often for free, at least as far as brain-training is concerned.

Don’t neglect your 9 IQs

We all have those 9 IQs: spatial, verbal, math, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, kinesthetic, naturalist and spiritual. These types of games typically offer spatial, verbal and math style puzzles. That leaves two-thirds of your intelligence untapped.

If you really want to help “train your brain”, learn to play a new instrument!

Make new friends, write an article or life story, take up bird-watching, solve an old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle (or a new-fashioned 3D puzzle), play a sport, read something complicated. To train your brain, you sometimes have to STRAIN your brain. Just like a muscle, you’ve got to push your brain beyond its comfort zone and it will respond by making new connections and strengthening existing neural networks. That’s why most video games, television shows and pulp reading don’t help. Their too easy.

To train your brain, you sometimes have to STRAIN your brain.

Training executive function and attention, two vital higher-order skills, is a different story, and the Nintendo Wii doesn’t have anything to genuinely fit the bill. There are some games that we use here at Sparks of Genius in our Electronic Playground that you can use at home. You’ll find them on this page.

So work your brain hard…and if you’re a teacher or parent, then work your kids’ brains hard, too. They’ll thank you for it later (if they don’t forget)!

Good luck!
Allen Dobkin

One a recent mini- vacation of sorts, I decided to spend some time playing the violin. Something fun, new and challenging: a Gypsy melody.

I wound up where I did not intend to be —back at the computer—and discovered another spark of genius.

There I was on YouTube.com watching a master violinist give students a series of incredible yoga-derived exercises here.

Kinesthetic intelligence has been defined as “the ability to think in movements and to use the body in skilled and complicated ways for expressive and goal directed activities.”

Dr. Branton Shearer, a member of the Sparks of Genius Community, explains it as “…a sense of timing, coordination for whole body movement and the use of hands for manipulating objects.”

A little background may shed some light. Yehudi Menuhin made his violin debut at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony. By the time he was thirteen, he had played in Paris, Carnegie Hall, Berlin and London.

His career took him all over the world, and he was known as an exceptional musician master educator and great humanitarian.
In 1948, Yehudi Menuhin he discovered a book on yoga in an osteopath’s office and around 1950 he went to India and met the yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar.

At the time, Menuhin was very busy and somewhat fatigued. It was supposed to be a quick five-minute session, but five minutes turned into an hour and Menuhin was completely uplifted. That evening, Menuhin and Iyengar forged a friendship that lasted nearly 50 years, until Menuhin’s death in 1999.

Menuhin was intrigued with the science of motion and sound as they related directly to the improvement of his violin performance. This lifelong study was both inspired and enhanced by his practice of yoga.

One needs to work through the poor sound and video quality and actually do these exercises to appreciate the sparks of genius in them.

You do not need to be a violinist or a musician to benefit from them. Go watch. Now.

To learn more about the 9 intelligences in our 5-4-9 formula, visit http://sparksofgenius.com/sparks.html

-Dr. Rohn Kessler

Self-Esteem is always a hot topic: what does it really do for people? How is it developed? Is it good to have a lot, or can you have too much? What effect does self-esteem have on school performance? It isn’t always easy to spot. Why?

“A given person with high implicit [or inner] self-esteem may be outwardly self-promoting or may be outwardly very modest,” said study team member Anthony Greenwald, a psychologist at the University of Washington.

Full Article Here

Low Self-Esteem is often confused with learned helplessness. Learned helplessness develops when a child is in school and has difficulty with, say, math. He struggles in math, possibly due to a weak teacher or just doesn’t have the same internal aptitude that others do. Maybe he was sick for a key week at school. For whatever reason, the child does poorly. Spurred on, the child decides to try his best for the next exam. Math being recursive, his lack of understanding of the prior material keeps him from really understanding the new stuff, and he gets a bad grade again even though he tried his hardest.

The child concludes, “I’m bad at math.” That is learned helplessness.

Contrast that experience with low self-esteem. A child goes to school and, despite good grades and many friends, feels like he or she isn’t any good in general.

Both conditions can lead to lack of effort in school and reduced performance, but one is based on a faulty conclusion drawn from real evidence while the other is a conclusion drawn despite external evidence (or due to internal evidence only).

The outward symptoms may look and sound the same, and the two issues are very similar, but they require a different touch to handle effectively.

This is where Sparks of Genius shines. What we do in our Electronic Playground is help children uncover hidden strengths, then we leverage those strengths to make improvements in other areas. How do we create total transformation? Through the 9-5-4 Program.

Even though there are 9 Intelligences, schools only care about one or two; Sparks of Genius taps into all 9.

• Verbal intelligence
• Mathematical intelligence
• Spatial intelligence
• Musical intelligence
• Kinesthetic intelligence
• Interpersonal intelligence
• Intrapersonal intelligence
• Spiritual intelligence
• Naturalist intelligence

Increase three or more [Cognitive Skills] and you’ve got a Total Transformation.

There are 5 Cognitive Skills. Increase one of these, and you increase cognitive ability. Increase three or more and you’ve got a Total Transformation.

• Attention
• Memory
• Learning
• Thinking
• Processing Speed

Finally, there are 4 Executive Functions. These are higher-order functions and essential for long-term success.

• Organization
• Planning
• Prioritizing
• Decision-Making

Students come to us, go through fancy, high-tech evaluations, and Dr. Kessler puts together a customized work-out regimen that plays on the student’s strengths and pumps up the areas that are weakest. 2-3 hours per week on a home computer, plus an hour in our high-tech, high-touch playground is usually all it takes. The results last, and they generalize to school, athletics, home, and the social realm.

Good luck!

Allen Dobkin

This is your brain on music.  Any questions?

Music is a universal language. Music has been recognized as a source of motivation, inspiration and guidance for thousands of years. Prophets of old would call for musicians as they sought to define the future. Musical groups were sent out first to prepare armies for war and to calm people for peace. It is used in restaurants to mold our eating habits. Opulent music in places of class and fast loud music to generate eating speed in fast food establishments. Music tells stories of love and of anarchy. Even with no lyrics our brains are hardwired to pick up the signals. Animals can be encouraged to perform better with the right music and plants listening to music grow and prosper.

It is no surprise that music can frame our minds to produce our future and increase learning capacity. Science is showing that music can be specially formulated to increase ability for motor skills, language skills and creative capacity. Take a look at this article by Advanced Brain Technology to see if music can be the next revolutionary in your life!

http://www.advancedbrain.com/Article_Spoonful_of_Music.asp

Dr Amy Price

Here is a great music video about the wonders of aging and fading memories.  Take three minutes to watch it: the laughs are good for you, even when they are at your own expense.

Note to young people: you won’t get it.

Years ago research showed that students who listened to music improved their performance on some visual thinking tasks given right after they heard the music. Many jumped on the bandwagon, but it turns out the research design was flawed. One group listened to music and the control group did nothing. In fact, when children in the control were given any mental stimulation at all, there was no advantage for music listening.

The key is looking at the long-term and not the short-term effects of music listening. 

Our brains are hardwired for music.

In fact, there are long term benefits of listening to music, notes Dan Levitin in This is Your Brain on Music.

“Music listening enhances or changes certain neural circuits, including the density of dendritic connections in the primary auditory cortex…The front portion of the corpus callosum—the mass of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres—is significantly larger in musicians than nonmusicians, and particularly for musicians who began their training early…Musicians tend to have larger cerebellums than nonmusicians, and an increased concentration of grey matter…responsible for information processing.” 

What does do these structural changes in the brain mean to you, the parent? Probably not much.

But what if musical preferences are actually influenced by what the fetus hears in the womb? Research indicates this is so. What if two-year olds begin showing a preference for the music of their culture? Research indicates this is so. What if the teenage years (around age 14) are the turning point for music preferences? Research also confirms this.

The bottom line is that the music we listen to in our early years often has the greatest effect on us and lays the foundation for all or most of our later music development.

I suggest parents pay much closer attention to the music they listen to during pregnancy and continue paying attention through during their children’s development through infancy, childhood and adolescence.

Levitin asserts that we are all more musically equipped than we think because our brains are hardwired for music. It is an obsession at the heart of human nature, perhaps even more fundamental than language.

Ideally, then, parents will not only listen to uplifting, meaningful music that moves them and encourage their children to do the same, but they will also play a musical instrument, dance and sing.

Dr. Rohn Kessler, Ed. D.

Updated today!  You can train your brain right now for free online with our GameZone!  Explore some exciting games, most with no downloads or passwords, that will work out your:

• Spatial Intelligence
• Concentration & Focus
• Memory Skills
• Executive Planning
• Pattern Recognition
• Cause & Effect
• Musical IQ

You might learn something…and while you play, see if you can feel your brain growing new connections, also known as Neurogenesis.

Parents: This is a great place to send your kids without worrying that their brains will rot.

The ears of a fetus are fully functional at twenty weeks, but an infant’s brain takes months or years to be fully functional.
Inside the womb the fetus hears sounds like the heartbeat of its mother.

A year after they are born, children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb.

According to Dr. Livitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music, the process goes something like this:

“You wake up from a deep sleep and open your eyes. The distant regular beating at the periphery of your hearing is still there. You rub your eyes with your hands, but you can’t make out any shapes of forms. Time passes, but how long? Half and hour? One hour?

“Then you hear a different but recognizable sound—an amorphous, moving, wiggly sound with fast beating, a pounding that you can feel in your feet. The sounds start and stop without definition. Gradually building up and dying down, they weave together with no clear beginnings or endings.

“These familiar sounds are comforting, you’ve heard them before. As you listen, you have a vague notion of what will come next, and it does, even as the sounds remain remote and muddled, as though you’re listening underwater.”

A fetus also hears music. A year after they are born, children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb.

Moreover, young infants seem to prefer fast, upbeat music to slow music.

How do we know this? In one experiment, mothers repeatedly played a certain piece of music (classical, reggae, Top 40 or world beat) during the last 3 months of their pregnancy. After birth, the mothers did not play this particular music for a year. At one year, the infants listened to both the music they heard in the womb and a novel piece of music in two different speakers. They looked longer at the speaker that was playing the music they heard in the womb than the other music.
Moreover, young infants seem to prefer fast, upbeat music to slow music.

Mothers take note: the music you listen to while pregnant does impact your child. So does the music you listen to during years one and two. What happens then?

That’s another story.

Dr. Rohn Kessler, Ed. D.

Why do we remember songs from our adolescence? Is it simply that our teen years tend to be emotionally charged, or is there something deeper happening in the developing brain? Do infants benefit from music? What about in the womb?

As adults, the music we identify with is the music we heard during those teen years.

I am reading a wonderful book called This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. The author is a musical neuroscientist who discusses how we experience music and why it plays such an important role in our lives.

If you are an adult, go back in your mind to music you listened to when you were a teen-ager. Do any songs come to mind? Of course they do. As adults, the music we identify with is the music we heard during those years.

By the age of fourteen the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adult-like levels of completion .

Around the age of ten or eleven most children become interested in music, and by the age of fourteen the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adult-like levels of completion. It seems that throughout adolescence our brains are developing and forming new connections at an explosive rate but this process slows down “substantially” after our teenage years.

Why do we remember songs from our adolescence? One reason is because these were years of self-discovery and very emotionally charged. “In general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to “tag” the memories as something important.”

While adults can acquire a taste for new kinds of music at any time, most of us have formed ours by the time we are eighteen or twenty.

What kind of music are your children and grandchildren listening to in these critical years between the ages of ten and fourteen? What about all the children in the country? In the entire world?

This Is Your Brain on Music is subtitled “The Science of a Human Obsession.” Because music is such a pervasive and powerful force, current neuroscience research suggests we pay close attention to the music our children are listening to, singing, dancing to and playing.

Next time we’ll discuss “safe” and “dangerous” music as well as music in the womb and the auditory world of infants.

Dr. Rohn Kessler