Hello Leigh VanHandel, I’m Leilany [ ], a student in high school and for my college English course, we were assigned to write a synthesis essay on a researchable topic and ask an interviewee to answer a few questions. The topic I chose was based on How Playing Music Affects the Developing Brain and its effects on learning and concentration.  Could you please answer the questions below it would really help with my essay?

1. From all the research that has been made and reviewed do you think music does indeed have a great effect on a child’s developing mind?
2. From what you’ve seen would it make you want to introduce a child of your own to music in hopes of giving them a boost in their learning skills?
3. Would you personally want to learn an instrument because of the benefits found in many research studies?
4. Do you think offering more musical classes in schools would improve the students learning abilities like improving test scores and graduation rates? 
5. Do you think musical activities and learning to play instruments be offered to elders in hopes of similar brain activity and changes that happen in children?

Thank you for your time,
Leilany

I finally got a moment to answer your questions, and my responses are below. My guess is that these weren’t the responses you were expecting, but if you ask a scientist questions, you’re going to get the best answer that the current science can provide, even if the answer isn’t what you want to hear!

1.    From all the research that has been made and reviewed do you think music does indeed have a great effect on a child’s developing mind? 

I think there’s no question that music has an effect on the mind, whether it’s of a child or an adult. The critical part of the question is whether the effect is systematic and consistent; does it affect all people similarly, or are its effects stronger in some people than in others (and the followup question that is why, and what makes the effects stronger in some people?). 

The other part of the question is, what are the effects? Engaging in music is going to increase musical knowledge and ability, for sure, but I think the question you’re asking is whether engaging with music creates what’s called a “far transfer” to other, nonmusical cognitive abilities/processes/skills. 

“Near transfer” is when a skill you’ve learned transfers easily to something that’s very related. Imagine if you practice throwing a beanbag into a hoop on the ground in front of you and you get really good at it; if you then use a slightly different beanbag or move the hoop a little further away from you, it’s a slightly different task but the things you’ve learned in practicing the first skill will definitely help with the second. Now imagine you’ve gotten so good at that skill that you try throwing a basketball at a basketball hoop that’s ten feet off the ground. That’s a much different skill and the things you learned in the first skill probably won’t help all that much. If the first skill DID help with the very different skill, though, that would be called “far transfer.” So engaging in music is likely to help with musical knowledge and understanding (because that’s near transfer), but does it help with things like reading or math (far transfer)? 

This was the problem with things like the “Mozart Effect” studies – researchers played music for students, and then tested them on things like spatial tasks or math tasks, and claimed they found an effect where if they played Mozart, people performed better on the spatial or math tasks. This led to a popular misconception that listening to music made you smarter, and a whole industry sprung up of recordings of “music for babies” or “study music” that was supposed to make you smarter just by listening to it. It’s a great story, and it’s one that a lot of people wanted to believe in – wouldn’t it be nice if we could just listen to music and make ourselves smarter? – but it’s not really true. The effect was incredibly inconsistent, and researchers only found that effect if they tested people immediately after listening to the music; if they tested them even a short time later, there was no effect or benefit from listening to the music. What was likely happening is that there was a temporary stimulating effect from listening to the music, which led people to perform slightly better on the unrelated task when they were tested immediately after listening. 

There’s been a lot of research on whether engaging with music (including playing it) has a far transfer effect, and the results are quite mixed; some studies claim they have found a strong positive result, and others claim they have found no evidence that music engagement results in far transfer. There’s a lot of potential confounds (things that might affect the results), in studies like this – you have to consider general intelligence measures, socio-economic status (instruments and music lessons cost money!), and personality factors. Young children who are able to engage with music probably come from a higher socio-economic background, which means they also may have access to a wider variety of other learning opportunities and materials than someone from a less fortunate socio-economic background. Saying that music was the thing that caused additional intellectual development ignores all of the other factors that the high socio-economic child may have had access to – better schools, more books, more leisure time to read, more educationally oriented toys, more access to sports, more access to tutors, etc. 

In general, the most current research shows that music does have an effect on the brain, but that effect most likely does not engage in far transfer to other cognitive skills. That’s not the story we want to hear, but that’s what the current research shows.  

2.    From what you’ve seen would it make you want to introduce a child of your own to music in hopes of giving them a boost in their learning skills? 

I would want to introduce a child to music in order to give them the opportunity to see if they enjoy it and if they’re good at it – but I would want to do that with a wide variety of experiences  for my child! And I wouldn’t make them do music if they weren’t interested in it; even if there were documented brain benefits to music, if you force someone to do something they don’t want to do, and they’re not enjoying it, they probably aren’t going to gain much benefit from it.   

3.    Would you personally want to learn an instrument because of the benefits found in many research studies? 

This is a bit of an unfair question – I already know how to play several instruments, so if I was to learn another instrument it would be because I wanted to learn that instrument, not because of any perceived brain benefits (which, as above, probably don’t exist). Hypothetically, if I didn’t play an instrument and I knew the results of the studies, it wouldn’t move me to start playing an instrument because the science tells me it doesn’t help. But if I wanted to play an instrument, I would start whether or not I thought I would get general cognitive benefits, because I would get musical benefits from learning it, and I would also get the enjoyment of learning to play the instrument and making music in general.  

4.   Do you think offering more musical classes in schools would improve the students learning abilities like improving test scores and graduation rates?  

Consider a school that has the capability of offering many music classes and has students who are interested and able to take the classes; that school is probably better funded than other schools, which means the school population is probably of a higher socio-economic status (since school funding tends to come from taxes collected from those who live around the school). It’s true that schools that serve higher socio-economic status students tend to have higher test scores and graduation rates than schools that serve lower socio-economic students –  but is that because they have music programs, or is that because the higher socio-economic students have more academic support throughout their lifetime, more access to educational resources in general, are less likely to have to work to support their families, and so on? Again, it’s really hard to say that music classes affect test scores and graduation rates when there’s so many other factors tied up into those things.  

There may be a correlation between schools that offer music courses and schools that have high test scores or graduation rates, but there’s no way you can say that the music classes cause those things. There’s a famous line in psychology, “correlation does not imply causation” – in other words, just because two things are related in some way doesn’t mean one causes the other. For example, say you notice that sales of ice cream are increasing, and sales of sunglasses are also increasing. Is one of those causing the other, or is it that both are increasing because of a third factor – sunny, hot weather? Schools that offer music classes may very well have higher test scores and higher graduation rates, but there are so many other reasons that may be.    

5.     Do you think musical activities and learning to play instruments be offered to elders in hopes of similar brain activity and changes that happen in children?

As with children, there’s evidence that musical activities and learning to play instruments provides a benefit to some older folks, but there isn’t any evidence that it helps or reverses the effects of aging. Again, it would be so wonderful if it did, since the effects of aging are so challenging for both those who are aging and their loved ones. I think that older folks should absolutely be given the opportunity to engage in music and learn to play instruments if it’s something that appeals to them and that they enjoy, and they may enjoy short-term but I’m skeptical that doing so would lead to any long-term cognitive benefits.

Overall, saying that music is important because it makes us smarter is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it diminishes the importance of music for its own sake! If our society thinks the most important thing about music is whether it makes us better at math, that says a lot about what we value, and I’d argue that it’s important to value music for what it does do – it gives us pleasure; it evokes feelings and memories, both happy and sad; and it makes us feel more connected to people, especially if we’re playing music with others.

I’m guessing these weren’t the responses you were expecting, but that’s where the science is right now.