Brain-Building Through Early Childhood Music

Lately, parents have taken to playing Mozart to their infant children, in hopes that the music will provide an advantage in brain development for the child. Music and math, at least, are related. Many mathematicians are also skilled musicians. The long relationship between music and mathematics apparently runs deep in the structure of the human brain. But to provide a true advantage to the young, growing brain, may require more active participation than merely listening to the music.

Schlaug, now at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues including Marie Forgeard and Ellen Winner at Boston College, studied 31 children. The researchers collected detailed magnetic resonance images of the children's brains at age 6 and again at 9. Of the original group, six children faithfully practiced at least 2.5 hours a week in the time between the scans. In these budding musicians, a region of the corpus callosum that connects movement-planning regions on the two sides of the brain grew about 25% relative to the overall size of the brain. Children who averaged only an hour or two of weekly practice and those who dropped their instruments entirely showed no such growth. All of the children practiced instruments, such as a piano or a violin, that required two hands.

In every subject, the researchers found that the size of increase in the corpus callosum predicted the improvement on a nonmusical test that required the children to tap out sequences on a computer keyboard. Schlaug says the findings should settle the earlier debate by showing that musical training can enhance neural connections related to planning and coordinating movements between the two hands. His team is now following up with the same children to investigate whether their training had other benefits, such as improved memory or reasoning skills. __Science

Schlaug's findings appear quite significant, and you would expect that 25% growth in the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres, would contribute to significant differences in other brain functions, and probably behaviours, besides musical performance. It is important to note that both instruments practised by the children required the use of both hands. Other instruments that require complex planning and coordination between the two hands would likely produce similar neuro-structural changes.

Music possesses an inner, mathematical structure. As young brains struggle to reproduce the inner structure of music through practise, is there any doubt but that their brains are changing--modifying themselves--to be better able to instantiate the musical structure through the musical instrument of choice?

The neuroanatomical changes only occurred in children who began regular musical practise before the age of 7, which suggests that an early start on musical training is important for those who eventually are to become virtuosos--for these particular instruments anyway.

The young brain develops along a sequential pathway. Critical periods or windows for different brain functions occur at different points in time. The window for vision is from two months to eight months. The social development and emotional control window is particularly open from ten to eighteen months. The window for math and logical skills is widely open between one and four years, and the window for musical development is between three and ten years--although perhaps one should not wait much beyond the sixth year to start. Source Other sources suggest waiting until five years before intense fingering training on musical instruments begins. Each child's developmental windows will be unique, although they should roughly follow the sequence suggested.

If children are to learn to speak a second language like a native, they should be introduced to the language by age ten. Source for more windows of development According to this source, social developmental windows remain open until ten years, particularly for empathy and envy.

The brain's neural axons myelinate in a roughly back-of-the-brain to front-of-the-brain direction, over the years. Trying to jump-start a particular brain function before the particular nerve pathways are myelinated, may produce less than satisfactory results. The windows of development for thought/emotional/motor skills follow the myelination sequence of the brain.

The pre-frontal lobes are the last parts of the brain to myelinate and mature--finally completing anywhere between the early twenties to the late twenties. Adolescents lack perspective and judgment at least partially due to the delayed maturity of the prefrontal lobes. Other neural functions can be mature, and the adolescent capable of phenomenal performance in many areas--and still lack basic adult-level maturity. This is common knowledge to any observer of adolescents and young adults.

We are all unique. We begin as unique individuals genetically, and grow more unique with every passing and diverging experience. Even identical twins display uniqueness in both genetics (copy number variants [CNV] and environmentally triggered epigenetic controls) and environment (intra- and extra-uterine).

The more we know about the unfolding of a child's being with time, the better able we will be to provide a more optimal environment for child development, and the acquisition of real world talents and competence.

But as the imaging technologies have become more sophisticated, the scientists have found many other neuroanatomical effects of the practice of music. Musicians have enlarged Broca's areas--the famous language area named after the 19th century psychiatrist.
Music practice correlates with an enlarged left planum temporale which is in Wernicke's area and lights up during both speech and music processing. What's going on with these language centers? One very clever study revealed the "bottomline". The scientists hooked up some musicians to the fMRI machines and had them listen to and follow the score of a Bach chorale. Unbeknownst to the musicians the investigators introduced an error into both teh performance and the score, to see what what would happen with this kind of 'exception processing' What happened was that the unexpected event lit up half a dozen areas of the brain which had prior thereto been considered part of the language-specific cortical circuitry.

So that's the bottom line of a decade of PET, MRI, fMRI and other imaging studies on the effect of the practice of music on the brain. The practice of music develops the language circuitry of the brain.
Source