# Can Music Make You Smarter or How Long Does It Take To Become A Virtuoso?



## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

How does our brain work with music and what effect does the exercise it gets when we play music have on our brain?

The Mozart effect suggests that children will become more intelligent if they listen to music composed by Mozart. But is it true? James May delves into the mysteries of music in his own inimitable way.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130807-can-music-make-you-smarter


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## jimihendrix (Jun 27, 2009)

How does one explain an "idiot savant"...aka "autistic savant"...???...

[video=youtube;SinshOsZlPg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SinshOsZlPg[/video]


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## jimihendrix (Jun 27, 2009)

Speaking of Mozart....this girl composes her own classical music....

[video=youtube;vUx4t4W4eVY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUx4t4W4eVY[/video]


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## puckhead (Sep 8, 2008)

nice link. I have made sure to introduce music to my kid from as early as possible.
music is language
music is math
music is art
music is emotion

seems like a pretty important element to add to the mental vocabulary


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

puckhead said:


> nice link. I have made sure to introduce music to my kid from as early as possible.
> music is language
> music is math
> music is art
> ...


That's one thing I wish I could have started when I was a kid. Alas, we were too poor to even think about buying a guitar.


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## greco (Jul 15, 2007)

Another story that damn near brought me to tears...Enjoy!!

This will be especially interesting to anyone teaching music.

Cheers

Dave

[video=youtube;Wpv7FAf3z_Q]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wpv7FAf3z_Q[/video]


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## puckhead (Sep 8, 2008)

Steadfastly said:


> That's one thing I wish I could have started when I was a kid. Alas, we were too poor to even think about buying a guitar.


I'm mostly talking about just teaching her to listen actively, like listening to the radio and tell me where the 1 beat is, picking out 3/4 time, things like that.
If she likes or dislikes a song, trying to tell me why.

she's in piano and choir now, but it was a matter of thinking about music as well as listening to it from an early age.


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

puckhead said:


> I'm mostly talking about just teaching her to listen actively, like listening to the radio and tell me where the 1 beat is, picking out 3/4 time, things like that.
> If she likes or dislikes a song, trying to tell me why.
> 
> she's in piano and choir now, but it was a matter of thinking about music as well as listening to it from an early age.


That's very good training and likely things she'll remember if she continues to take music seriously.


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## FrankyNoTone (Feb 27, 2012)

Not to derail this thread... but I picked up the guitar for the chick's.


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## Guest (Aug 26, 2013)

this must be you then. lol.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

An acquaintance, who used to be a prof at Waterloo and is now at Florida State at the Center for the Study of Expertise, used to study musical savants, among other things (e.g., coaches, prodigies, and chess experts). He told me that actually musical savants make a lot more mistakes than most folks realize, but when they do make mistakes, they tend to substitute the notes that most folks would agree makes an excellent 2nd best choice. In a way, it's like those elevator music versions of popular tunes you'll sometimes hear where a riff goes down instead of up, just so they don't have to pay royalties on the tune.

Musical savants, and indeed prodigies in a great many areas, tend to occur where there is clear structure to the domain being acquired. So, you;ll find child prodigies in math, and physics, and music, but generally not in history or literature. The first 3 are highly rule-governed, where the latter 2 are not. Similarly, you find musical savants generally in nice tonal western music, and rarely in jazz or anything not following a clearcut set of rules. So, expect a savant to hear and repeat a baroque piece, but not some Oscar Petersen or Art Tatum. I'm not trying to diminish their accomplishment at all, merely noting that it occurs under some fairly specific and favourable conditions.

Can/does music aid cognition in a general sense? Yes, but not in any specific or magical way. I suspect studying the periodic table of the elements (assuming you could find it as interesting and pleasurable as music) would yield every bit as much "benefit" as some claim to have observed with music. Any time one can access other systems models for phenomena and apply them to whatever you happen to be thinking about at the moment, you get kind of a lateral-thinking boost. Most great thinkers will tell you that having multiple mental models to turn to is helpful for reframing problems in new ways and breaking out of unproductive ways of trying to solve problems. Folks who study bilingualism will tell you that being fluent in more than one language earely on tends to be predictive of greater flexibility in problem solving.

So, useful, but nothing really all THAT special about music.

That said, one of my absolute favourite books about music is this one: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/origins-music Highly recommended.


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## Shark (Jun 10, 2010)

Our brains function slightly differently as infants than later in life and we all learn easier when we are younger. Learning music as a young child creates neural systems that remain in place throughout life. Because music is multi-sensory it is excellent at developing multiple areas of the brain. Music develops areas of the brain that spill over to other functions better than anything else I can think of. Being a musician creates larger areas in the brain regions that relate to motor skills, auditory perception, and spatial awareness; musicians are better at picking up on emotional cues in people's voices; musicians can distinguish sounds from each other better (like a single conversation in a noisy room); and musicians are better at learning languages. 

As far as savants go, I have read hypotheses that speculate that the savant qualities come from: a) The fact that they draw heavily from the left hemispheres of their brains and therefore are able to focus very clearly on structured things; and b) A certain area of their brains has much stronger connections than normal and therefore they can more naturally process certain types of information. Both of which are saying, in effect, "Yeah, it's something in the way their brains work", which is not especially helpful, yet.

I've worked with a number of autistic individuals and none of them showed any savant-like qualities. However, this is quite possibly because they have not ever received the right nurturing and encouragement in whatever area would have most flourished. THIS book is a personal journey of that sort of thing. From the back cover:



> Kristine Barnett’s son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein’s, a photographic memory, and he taught himself calculus in two weeks. At nine he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe may someday put him in line for a Nobel Prize, and at age twelve he became a paid researcher in quantum physics. But the story of Kristine’s journey with Jake is all the more remarkable because his extraordinary mind was almost lost to autism. At age two, when Jake was diagnosed, Kristine was told he might never be able to tie his own shoes.
> 
> The Spark is a remarkable memoir of mother and son. Surrounded by “experts” at home and in special ed who tried to focus on Jake’s most basic skills and curtail his distracting interests—moving shadows on the wall, stars, plaid patterns on sofa fabric—Jake made no progress, withdrew more and more into his own world, and eventually stopped talking completely. Kristine knew in her heart that she had to make a change. Against the advice of her husband, Michael, and the developmental specialists, Kristine followed her instincts, pulled Jake out of special ed, and began preparing him for mainstream kindergarten on her own.
> 
> ...


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## fredyfreeloader (Dec 11, 2010)

I think you have reached the virtuoso level when no one can play along with you and no one has wanted to play with me for years and years. I must be good.!!!!


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Shark said:


> Our brains function slightly differently as infants than later in life and we all learn easier when we are younger. Learning music as a young child creates neural systems that remain in place throughout life. Because music is multi-sensory it is excellent at developing multiple areas of the brain. Music develops areas of the brain that spill over to other functions better than anything else I can think of. Being a musician creates larger areas in the brain regions that relate to motor skills, auditory perception, and spatial awareness; musicians are better at picking up on emotional cues in people's voices; musicians can distinguish sounds from each other better (like a single conversation in a noisy room); and musicians are better at learning languages.
> 
> As far as savants go, I have read hypotheses that speculate that the savant qualities come from: a) The fact that they draw heavily from the left hemispheres of their brains and therefore are able to focus very clearly on structured things; and b) A certain area of their brains has much stronger connections than normal and therefore they can more naturally process certain types of information. Both of which are saying, in effect, "Yeah, it's something in the way their brains work", which is not especially helpful, yet.
> 
> I've worked with a number of autistic individuals and none of them showed any savant-like qualities. However, this is quite possibly because they have not ever received the right nurturing and encouragement in whatever area would have most flourished. THIS book is a personal journey of that sort of thing. From the back cover:


After spending many years in the neurosciences, as well as many other areas of psychology, I can safely say that all that neurologizing (as Don Hebb used to call it) doesn't really add anything to the explanation. There are certainly learning _opportunities_ afforded by investing oneself in music in several ways, but "music" in and of itself, doesn't produce anything different, and what it offers can be gotten other ways. No need to throw brain stuff into the explanation. Same thing with bilingual upbringing; we see certain cognitive outcomes that are associated with being raised/schooled in two or more languages, but those same outcomes can be observed under other circumstances as well, and plenty of folks raised in more than one language fail to show those outcomes. So, certainly look into it, by all means, but don't place all your chips on it.

Savants are also nothing special. They are impressive, to be sure, but simply show the same high performance anyone would show if they devoted as much time and effort into a narrowly circumscribed set of skills as the savants do. Typically, savants will spend every waking minute thinking about and mentally rehearsing solutions to problems in the areas they have high performance in. The analogy I used to use in class (but probably can't anymore) is that of Tetris. When Tetris was popular, people would spend inordinate amounts of time on it. And if one was engaged in it enough, you'd "see" the shapes even when you _weren't_ playing the game. Sit down in a public bathroom to take a dump, and you found yourself identifying Tetris shapes in the wall or floor tiles, and figuring out how you needed to rotate them to place them. Columns in newspapers would take on shapes that demanded imagining how to use them. And so on. Same thing happens with chess players. I am confident that Jeff Beck imagines how to insert bends into riffs while he's working on cars, and Sonny Landreth imagines how to slide from chord formation A to B while he's picking crawdads apart. I know I bring my tablet with 8 gig of schematics with me wherever I go, and it is often my busride and night-time reading. If I'm not busy building, I'm thinking about circuit functioning and signal processing. Heck, even when I'm building, if the task at hand is mindless enough, I'll be thinking about a different circuit. I don't read fiction, but I do like datasheets and parts catalogs.

Perhaps a more familiar analog will help. There are two acquired skills/activities we probably have more practice with than anything else in our entire lives, and these end up being skills we can exercise under just about ANY circumstance, with remarkable fluidity and speed, requiring remarkable comutational demands that make astrophysics a job for chumps. Language and motor coordination. Indeed, most people can engage in both simultaneously (although excessively high demand in the one tends to detract from performance in the other). There is no supercomputer on earth than can comprehend and produce language with the complexity and speed that humans do in normal conversation. The computational demands are astronomical, and much like legislators that can sign off on expenditures/commitments of trillions without thinking much about it, we regularly engage in these fantastic linguistic feats all day long, every day, without pausing to consider how remarkable they are.

And we practice them, almost all day long, even _thinking_ in terms of linguistic utterances when reading or silently thinking to ourselves, even when there is no one actually talking. The amount of practice we have had with language, both using it and thinking about it, by the time we are 10, probably amounts to at least 20,000hrs. When an autistic person, who has perhaps set aside social interaction to devote their time to other things, fopcuses on one narrowly circumscribed set of interests/activities, it is no great surprise that they acquire prodigious degrees of skill in it, the same way the average 10 year-old who has spent thousands of hours verbally interacting with all sorts of people around them, listening to TV, movies, conversations, reading, etc. can process linguistic information at rates unimaginable for any existing supercomputer.

So, there may well be something special about the brains of autistic individuals that _prevents_ them from being able to make sense of social information from other humans (and numerous theorists in the field will say that folks in the autism spectrum lack a "theory of mind" to a greater or lesser degree), but what they acquire does not depend on anything special about their brains. It's just normal human learning, such as you see from just about anyone who persists at some category of tasks or content domain.


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## Shark (Jun 10, 2010)

I wish I were more on the ball to discuss this properly. Ironically, I just had a concussion two weeks ago--my fourth one in just over a year--and I am really not functioning well at all, especially with my memory. 



mhammer said:


> There are certainly learning _opportunities_ afforded by investing oneself in music in several ways, but "music" in and of itself, doesn't produce anything different, and what it offers can be gotten other ways.


Without trying to argue, I have read a few articles and studies that indicate that musicianship creates neural benefits that do not come in other ways--at least not in quite the ways as they do from playing an instrument. What other ways would you say equal the benefits gained from learning a musical instrument? I'm genuinely curious.



mhammer said:


> Savants are also nothing special. They are impressive, to be sure, but simply show the same high performance anyone would show if they devoted as much time and effort into a narrowly circumscribed set of skills as the savants do. Typically, savants will spend every waking minute thinking about and mentally rehearsing solutions to problems in the areas they have high performance in. The analogy I used to use in class (but probably can't anymore) is that of Tetris. When Tetris was popular, people would spend inordinate amounts of time on it. And if one was engaged in it enough, you'd "see" the shapes even when you _weren't_ playing the game. Sit down in a public bathroom to take a dump, and you found yourself identifying Tetris shapes in the wall or floor tiles, and figuring out how you needed to rotate them to place them.


Interesting thoughts, for sure. Perhaps the level of single-minded focus achieved by savants is inherent in the way their brains are to begin with, though. 

Anyways, I'll come back to this in six months with, hopefully, a clearer head.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Shark said:


> I wish I were more on the ball to discuss this properly. Ironically, I just had a concussion two weeks ago--my fourth one in just over a year--and I am really not functioning well at all, especially with my memory.


So why are you wasting your time here? You should be a pro athlete, pulling in their kinda money! Four concussions is probably well below average for most CFL or NHL players.

All kidding aside, though, a speedy recovery to you, and _stay the hell away from #5_.



> Without trying to argue, I have read a few articles and studies that indicate that musicianship creates neural benefits that do not come in other ways--at least not in quite the ways as they do from playing an instrument. What other ways would you say equal the benefits gained from learning a musical instrument? I'm genuinely curious.


I'm a connectionist at heart, so I am disinclined to think in terms of "neural benefits", or brain mechanisms at all, preferring to think in terms of what people know, how their knowledge is organized, and how they get to that. Some 30 years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a week-long seminar given by Nobel laureate Roger Sperry (the split-brain guy) on mind-body dualism. While the sort of neuroscientist that most brain folks worship, he was quite comfortable leaving reductionism aside and switching to mentalistic constructs when neurologizing failed to add to understanding. As he put it to us "You don't explain the behaviour of a rubber ball by appealing to the structure of rubber molecules. You explain it in terms of the physics of balls." In other words, when higher-order constructs can't do the job, THEN you employ reductionistic approaches, but only those that help in understanding. We don't expect quantum physics to "explain" behaviour, even though we are all obviously just atoms with subatomic particles. We appeal to higher-order concepts because they make sense of what we wish to be comprehensible to us. Ultimately, we ARE "just brain", but if discussing in terms of knowledge-acquisition, organization, and utilization does a fine job of explaining and predicting the phenomena of interest, there is no need to drop below that level. I've done my share of rat neurosurgery, single-cell recording, assessment of brain-injured persons, brain slicing and staining, and neuropharmacology, so I am well aware of its value. But there is much it is not required for to explain things, and skill is one of them. If anything, evoking neural concepts when trying to explain skill tends to obscure details and over-simplify what actually happens; i.e., it's a bad distraction that far too many use as a rhetorical device to persuade...the way that advertisements used to talk about "computer-designed" to persuade you into thinking the product simply couldn't BE any better (even though it was a person who had to program the damn computer in the first place).

But, back to your question...

What does musical information and experience have to offer the learner? First, music and language are siblings. Not identical, but sharing of so many features. Indeed, much of what we take for granted in music is really a continuation of early communicative behaviour. Raspiness and pitch in vocalizations is used in deliberate fashion to convey emotion within our first 8 months, and the structure and duration of wordless vocalizations is frequently about the same length as musical phrases and sentences spoken by mature individuals. The emotions we infer by higher notes are different than those we infer from lower notes, as is the emotion we infer from notes (and eventually words) strung close together in time, versus spread out. (Again, can't recommend highly enough the book I linked to earlier. As comprehensive a look at music as one can imagine, from prehistoric evidence of "music" in early man, to global comparison of musical systems, to pan-species examination of vocal utternaces and "song", to language-music linkages in young children)

Music - at least the western music from non-nomadic cultures we are generally familiar with - has patterns, and offers the opportunity for learning about, and playing with, patterns. But then so does athletics and language. The arm swinging involved in the rings (gymnastics) shares something in common with the arm swinging of fast pitch and the hammer throw. The patterns available within music are analogous to the patterns found in poetry, or even the structure of jokes (knock-knock, who's there). Performance on IQ tests (which capture some, but not all, of what we mean by "intelligence") is frequently contingent on pattern-recognition ability. Spatio-musical pattern recognition is helpful, as is verbal pattern recognition, and having both is even better. Having more alternatives - eseentially tools in your pattern-recognition toolbelt - affords greater flexibility in problem solving. 

Years ago, I had the pleasure of sitting beside, and chatting with, noted astronomer Carl Sagan. When I asked him how it was possible to even imagine the universe spatially, he replied that eventually it felt like a familiar neighbourhood, "Go out to Alpha Centauri, take a left and go for 23 light years. Can't miss it." Even astronomy and astroĥysics is aided by having other mental models to provide patterns to generalize from. Music is just another mental model to generalize from.

Other advantages of music can come from the rapid decoding of symbol systems. We say that people learn to "read" music. Reading involves taking arbitrary symbols we call letters and words, and inferring the social intent of an invisible person from them, at a rate that is similar to live interaction. As you read this, you are imagining me talking to you. Maybe not accurately, but in a fashion that at least feels plausible to you. If you have a hard time reading, or if I am a hopelessly bad writer, you'll be able to work your way through what I've written here, but it will not feel like there is a live person behind it, talking to you; indeed, you will lose track of the train of thought. Similarly, reading music and especially sight-reading, involves decoding arbitrary symbols and mentally recreating the original invisible musician. And even though we do not often think of it, reading scientific formulae, and mathematical expressions with Greek letters, is also mentally recreating an imagined invisible thinker, who is explaining what all is involved in some process or outcome. Mathematicians and other disciplines that utilize such arbitrary symbol systems with numbers are doing exactly the same thing that musicians do, and that any reader of language does. Being able to do more than one of those, with some degree of fluidity, is probably very helpful in fostering more advanced thinking. And as we have learned from the study of bilingualism, when people can take a step back and think in terms of different "representational systems", rather than just the one thing they know how to do/speak, it adds much to their thinking.

Stated more succinctly: more analogies is good for ya.



> Interesting thoughts, for sure. Perhaps the level of single-minded focus achieved by savants is inherent in the way their brains are to begin with, though.
> 
> Anyways, I'll come back to this in six months with, hopefully, a clearer head.


Persistence is an important part of what allows acquisition of high levels of skill, and persistence is often heavily influenced, or mediated, by temperament; itself an inborn set of traits. If folks experience the physical sensations of frustration intensely or very quickly or in some sort of prolonged fashion that does not easily subside, it becomes more difficult (though not impossible) for them to dedicate themselves to a given task. So yes, there IS likely to be a heritable component in what allows some folks to focus heavily on a category of tasks and acquire high levels of knowledge and skill. But, as I'm sure you are aware, knowledge and skill itself begets concentration. Pick up a text on some field you know very little about, and your mind will wander very far very quickly. Pick up a book on something you know a bit about and are interested in, and the hours will fly by just like that. Kids with the most annoying ADD will sit for hours at a videogame, without being distracted. So the focus is not JUST a byproduct of biological aspects of the person. Knowledge plays a big role in focus and persistence too.

Myself, I am disinclined to believe in the heritability of knowledge itself. That is, what differentiates people with varying levels of skill is their strategies, and strategies are not the sort of thing one can code for and transmit genetically. You CAN code for something being interesting or aversive, so I have no issue with, say, some folks just being borne feeling a thrill of movement (whatever that is, I can't say that I've every felt it), such that they invest themselves in athletics, and are able to sustain the practice and interest that results in the thousands of hours required for the level of skill they display. But nobody is "born" a basketball superstar with innately encoded strategies for play or judging shots.


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## kat_ (Jan 11, 2007)

greco said:


> Another story that damn near brought me to tears...Enjoy!!
> This will be especially interesting to anyone teaching music.
> Cheers
> Dave


If you like that one then you should also watch http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_paravicini_and_adam_ockelford_in_the_key_of_genius.html

One point to remember out of Derek's story is if you're going to be born severely autistic it helps to be born to a family that's tremendously wealthy. I can't help wondering how many other potential geniuses are sitting in group homes plunking away at cheap Casios with no one there to listen.


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## Shark (Jun 10, 2010)

Thanks for your reply, Mark. It's a discussion I'd love to have in more detail when I'm again able to do so.



mhammer said:


> So why are you wasting your time here? You should be a pro athlete, pulling in their kinda money! Four concussions is probably well below average for most CFL or NHL players.
> 
> All kidding aside, though, a speedy recovery to you, and _stay the hell away from #5_.


Actually, I was going to be a pro athlete in my teens, before a health condition took me out of being able to compete at that level. Up until then I was pretty darn good. Any tips for concussion recovery, other than rest? I still hadn't come back fully from my first one last June when I fell over six feet onto my head and back from a chin-up bar. I feared for months that the mental "spark" would never come back. Then I had two more in the same week last November. And now this one.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I wish I could sound as in-the-know about concussions as I am able to sound about a lot of other things. But this is something I don't know much about. I think it also bears noting that virtually every closed head injury is a little different from every other, so whatever rehab work is needed is going to be custom-tailored.

Are you in a city where good analysis and rehab can be gotten?


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## Shark (Jun 10, 2010)

I'll PM you so as not to further derail the thread!


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