Music as a hobby has been shown to have beneficial effects on general cogni-tive development. The mere exposure to sound has been shown to have sev-eral benefits on the brain in animal and human studies. For example, the amount of dopamine, important for the reward system, regulating sleep, mood, attention and learning, (Sutoo & Akiyama 2004), and the activity patterns of the glutamate receptors (Nichols et al. 2007) are enhanced by simple sound exposure. In the auditory cortical areas, sound exposure alters the regularity of the structure of the auditory cortex and enhances learning and memory (Angelucci et al. 2007). In several key brain areas like the hip-pocampus, hypothalamus and cortical areas, sound exposure increases the production of new neurons and nerve growth (Angelucci et al. 2007), making these areas more capable of adapting to new types of challenging tasks.
When children with music as their hobby are compared to their peers, several very general enhancements can be observed. For example,
correla-tions between music or sound perception skills have been found with spatial reasoning, reading, phonemic awareness and general intelligence in children (Nelson & Barresi 1989; Douglas & Willats 1994). In addition, correlations between musical training have been observed with verbal memory and flu-ency, visuospatial perception, attention allocation and different reading tasks in children. Further, the amount of musical training that a child has received correlates with general intelligence (Schellenberg 2006). Such findings speak for a strong correlation between general cognitive capabilities and musical education. These studies fail to show, however, the direction of causality, namely, whether the children with strong cognitive capabilities become inter-ested in music and want to pursue it as their hobby, continue it because of the success received due to their high cognitive capabilities, or whether musical training really enhances the children’s cognitive capabilities in a very general way.
The only way to answer this chicken and egg question is to perform ex-pensive and time-consuming interventional studies. In these studies, children are randomly allocated to groups that receive intensive high-level profes-sional training either music or another extracurricular activity, and their skill profiles are assessed prior to and after the training. There are several such interventional programs currently running in many countries. The first results clearly show that in two similar groups with similar before-training skill profiles, the group with musical training will achieve higher mathematical and spatial skills, reasoning skills, reading and writing skills, and skills of detecting changes in prosodic features of speech (Gardiner et al. 1996;
Rauscher et al. 1993; Gromko et al. 2005; Bilhartz et al. 2000; Costa-Giomi 2004; Thompson et al. 2004; Moreno et al. 2006, 2008). Thus it seems evi-dent that the chicken exists before the egg—children really do benefit from musical training irrespective of their prior cognitive capabilities, inherited musical skills, or family-related matters like social status or parents’ interest towards music.
Tallal and Gaab (2006) proposed that, in addition to specific effects like enhancement of the auditory system areas, two major general effects would be responsible for the higher cognitive skills after musical training. First, if children learn to control their attention, this ability leads to very general ef-fects in both learning and testing situations. Thus, learning to control volun-tary attention, learning to suppress involunvolun-tary shifts of attention, and learn-ing to shift one’s attention back to the original task quickly and effortlessly after an involuntary shift of attention are all key skills in working in noisy environments. This is an effect that music has in common with other extra-curricular activities, at least in some of them like theater, circus, and dance, activities where the attentive skills are needed to synchronize one’s timing
with others for several minutes and with an accuracy of tens of milliseconds.
Second, Tallal and Gaab suggest a general effect of enhanced sequencing skills. They propose that the exposure to music, containing constantly several levels of structures starting from the structure of the piece on a general level and ending in the structure observed within a single bar on a very specific level, would enhance sequencing skills in any task and thus make the child more able to notice sequences appearing in nature, and in tasks. The formula-tion of the sequencing skills is still somewhat open, but it is clear that if such skills are generally enhanced by being exposed to music, the effects would be very beneficial and very general, observable in all possible tasks and offering possibilities for memory functions that are very efficient.
Conclusions
For the whole society, it is beneficial if children have an opportunity to be engaged with music according to their needs and hopes. Neuroscience sheds some light on this question demonstrating several specific and general effects that are observed in children when they play musical instruments, sing, or are engaged in several types of musical activities. This information is also impor-tant to families who are considering offering their child some extracurricular activities. Further, this information is also important for music educators in order to understand that music education is beneficial for all children in sev-eral different ways and at sevsev-eral levels, and that musical education has also benefits outside the acquisition of musical skills. Education programmes in music should be available for children who have high musical aptitude and are willing to work hard on their activity. At the same time, possibilities for engagement with music and musical education should be offered to children who lack some key musical or motoric skills and who may not be willing to spend more than one or two hours per week with their hobby.
For policy makers, especially considering the increasing need to solve is-sues like attention deficits, minor attention regulation problems, learning problems, problems in reading and writing and school bullying, these results should bring a clear message that music education should be available for all children. At schools, the best benefits from music education are obtained with it is not optional, but is offered simultaneously to the whole class, strengthen-ing the social bondstrengthen-ing among the pupils and givstrengthen-ing everybody the possibility to join. Music as a hobby and music at daycare centres and schools should be considered as a key element that supports the learning and attentive skills of individual pupils and social bonding of the group. In my opinion, there is
enough neuroscientific and other evidence to prove that music is beneficial for children.
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