Does Music Training Actually Strengthen the Mind?

Was it any coincidence that one of the greatest physicists of our time was also a master violinist?
 
Albert Einstein received violin lessons as young as the age of six. Einstein grew up with a mother who was a talented pianist and she encouraged him to make musical expression a part of his daily home life. By the time he was 13, Einstein picked up an interest in Mozart. By 17, he was playing adagios from Beethoven's sonatas.

Current research suggests that music training active involvement with an instrument and not just passive listening to music affects the brain in several important ways:

Improves Verbal Memory

For parents who feel that paying for music teachers is hard to justify, consider this study: Researchers from the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University found that musical ability is connected to reading ability because both are correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brain stem. So if your child struggles with reading, he or she may not just need more books, but maybe piano classes for kids, too.

Enhances Brain Plasticity

Early musical training translates to a more plastic brain in adult life, according to a 2012 study by a researcher from the same Northwestern University laboratory, and colleagues from other universities. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to compensate for the deficits of the other parts of the brain that no longer functions. It was found that those who had received music training in their childhood, even if they hadn't continued training late in life, had faster brain response to speech compared to those who didn't have any musical training at all. This is encouraging news for those who feel they are too old for any type of music lesson. If you want to catch up as an adult, perhaps this is the time to take up beginner guitar lessons.Guitars are one of the easiest instruments to learn, and you can progress to other instruments or discover other musical passions from there.

Creates Stronger White Matter Connectivity

Music lessons before the age of seven suggests that they can physically alter the white matter in the corpus callosum that bundle of nerves that connects the right, logical side of the brain with its left,creative counterpart. The thicker the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, the greater the brains ability to see relationships, connections and parallelisms among disparate ideas. This could help explain why Einstein was able to draw conclusions from seemingly unrelated concepts and develop his famous theory. (He was known to have musical breaks in between intense sessions of problem solving.)

Leads to Thicker Gray Matter in the Cortex

Who knew that private music lessons could help with your child's behavioral problems? Verbal and intuitive intelligence are not the only domains where music has been found to have important influence. The ability to focus attention, control emotions, and reduce anxiety are a important to growing children as they are to stressed adults. In 2014,researches from the University of Vermont published their findings about the behavior-regulating effects of music education: the same emotional control shown in the subjects has been tied with the kind of control and coordination of movements necessary to play an instrument.

With these findings, its becoming all the more important to make music education a core subject in public schools.