Musical Education

Image by @Wickliffe via Flickr

Learning to play a musical instrument or sing, apparently enhances brain activity in children, according to an extract from an article I read today. It is necessary to actually interact with the music in some way, so passive listening doesn't have the same effect. Apparently something to do with learning how to co-ordinate an instrument with the music (or to sing) enables pathways in the brain to form which are not there in non-musicians. This is particularly obvious in children, but the evidence for enhanced brain activity for adult musical learners is not quite so clear-cut.