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Ever since I was a young child, music has played a very large role in my life. I started playing the violin when I was about 5, and it has had a big impact on my life. Even though my passions have expanded since I was a child, I still make time for me to engage in the musical world. Due to this, I have always been intrigued as to how these experiences have affected my brain, and other people like me.

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Christopher Chau & Theresa Riforgiate . The Influence of Music on the Development of Children. . The Influence of Music on the Development of Children. , A Senior Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Bachelor of Science Degree in Child Development , 2010.

Sarrazin, Natalie Rose. “Music and the Child .”
http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=psycdsp

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“Do Musicians Have Different Brains?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/eyes-the-brain/201006/do-musicians-have-different-brains.

Barnes. “Science Shows How Musicians' Brains Are Different From Everybody Elses'.” Mic, Mic Network Inc., 25 Oct. 2015, mic.com/articles/96150/science-shows-how-musicians-brains-are-different-from-everybody-elses.

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“What Music Does To Your Emotions, Your Pains And Your Brain.” Pinterest, www.pinterest.com/pin/441282463469187665.

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When listening to music, the auditory cortex separates sound components according to pitch and timing. Pitch is one of the most understood concepts of the musical brain. Even people who don't play an instrument tend to have even a small sense of intervals, melody, and harmony the more they listen to music.

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Louder and surprising sounds tend to not distract the children that have more exposure to music.

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Children with exposure to music are more mature when it comes to processing auditory features.

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According to the author of Music and the Child, Natalie Rose Sarrazin, "When listening to music, sound vibrations enter the auditory cortex and are instantaneously broken down into elements of pitch, timbre, spatial relations, and tone duration. The data is then sent to other parts of the brain and compared against stored sound associations (do I run or stay) and emotional responses (do I like it or not), stimulating many parts of the brain in both hemispheres."

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Young children that have been involved in music tend to have higher levels in "phonological awareness and early reading skills."

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According to  Christopher Chau & Theresa Riforgiate, “Children who played and practiced a musical instrument showed numerous benefits, such as greater improvements in motor-finger dexterity and in auditory melodic and rhythmic discrimination skills. In addition, findings from MRI brain scans showed that structural brain changes in motor and auditory areas (of critical importance for instrumental music training) were correlated with behavioral improvements on motor and auditory-musical tests”.

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How listening to music can affect the brain

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How listening to music can affect the brain

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Due to a experiment by Pick, Gross, Heinrichs, and Love where they tested if children from different age groups (3-5 and 5-7) years could identify the sound of an instrument with the name of it, they found that toddlers (7-9) months used their eyes more to identify what instrument corresponded to the sound.

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There is more activity in the motor and prefrontal cortex in children that play an instrument. These are two areas that people with ADHD struggle in.

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Starting music training at a younger age makes it easier for children to strategize, retain information, problem solve, and be flexible.

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Children who begin their musical training at age seven have a larger corpus callosum than people who start later.

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According to Tom Barnes, musicians have a stronger corpus callosum which acts as a bridge between two hemispheres.

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Playing music stimulates the left brain, the mathematical hemisphere, and the right brain, the creative hemisphere.

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Through the study of neuroscience, one can observe by hooking a musician's brain to an EEG machine that a consistent and focus practice can lead to permanent changes in the visual, motor, and verbal cortex's of the brain.

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Musicians who begin playing an instrument as a child can retain foreign languages faster.
(personal photo)

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According to Tom Barnes, children with 1-5 years of music experience remember 20% more vocabulary words than the average child.

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Musicians tend to use their brains to give each memory multiple "tags", like an audio, emotional, and conceptual tag.

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People who listen to music are able to use multiple parts of their brains at once. However musician's brains tend to expend more energy when playing an instrument according to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery and Positron Emission Tomography machines.

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Musicians have a higher level of executive function, which is a collection of tasks that includes planning and attention to detail, and requires analysis of cognitive and emotional aspects.

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Musicians can problem solve faster than other people in social and academic settings.

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TEDEducation. “How Playing an Instrument Benefits Your Brain - Anita Collins.” YouTube, YouTube, 22 July 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0JKCYZ8hng.

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How playing an instrument can benefit the brain

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How playing an instrument can benefit the brain

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How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins

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The brain can reorganize itself after learning a group of difficult tasks, like playing the piano, which requires understanding rhythms, reading music, and having good hand-eye coordination.

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How music training can affect the brain. 

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How music training can affect the brain. 

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In an experiment where ten female college students that had no musical ability and ten other female students who started playing an instrument between the ages of 7-8 were gathered. Both groups did similarly when it came to identifying a number of 20 words within a larger list of 40 words. However, the musicians used their visual cortex to recall the words they had heard earlier. Since the musicians had training in memorizing music through visualization, they were able to apply this skill into other situations.

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Musicians tend to have better verbal and musical memory.

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Musical training increases the size and number of nerve cells in the brain.  These larger cells are often found in the auditory, visual, motor, and spatial areas of the cerebral cortex.