Four years ago, Michael Gazzaniga, professor of neuroscience at University of California, Santa Barbara, assembled a consortium of cognitive neuroscientists from seven universities to address the question of whether exposure to the arts, particularly music or dance, improves cognitive performance in children and young adults. Of particular interest is music exposure.
Gazzaniga’s question can be separated further into two components: Do performing, practicing and seeking higher skill levels in music affect the structures and functions of the brain? And does the accomplishment of musical proficiency affect the acquisition of other cognitive skills, such as attention or mathematical ability?
The investigators brought the full array of the new technologies of neuroscience, brain imaging, psychology and genetics to these problems. I heard several researchers present the preliminary results of the consortium at the Dana Center in Washington on March 4, an event Brenda Patoine covers in her front-page story, “Research Consortium Finds New Evidence Linking Arts and Learning.”
The full report, “Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition,” is available online. I have selected some of the highlights of this research, focusing on two studies involving music.
Music and math abilities linked
There is the empirical observation that those accomplished in music are also proficient in math. We also have studies indicating that the exposure of young children to music instruction improves their math learning. Elizabeth Spelke and her colleagues at Harvard have analyzed this link further, asking what aspects of mathematics, if any, are influenced by exposure to music.
Prior research has indicated three core systems at the basis of mathematical reasoning: a system for representing small, exact numbers (up to three); a system for representing large, approximate numbers; and a system for representing geometric properties and relationships. Spelke utilized these three in her studies.
Spelke studied school children in Boston with varying exposures to music. Her results indicate that exposure to music affects only the third category, the system for geometric properties. Furthermore, this effect was limited to those with strong exposure to music, and was not seen in those with a similar exposure to other art forms, such as dance or writing.
This series of experiments goes beyond the question of whether arts education is good for a child’s brain. It asks which specific systems involved in cognition are enhanced by intensive training.
How does music affect cognition?
Classical neurology was based on the concept of localization of functions to specific areas of the brain. That approach has expanded to include the concept of distributed networks, systems that connect the several different brain areas involved in a specific process. Michael Posner and his colleagues at the University of Oregon have postulated that there are different networks for different art forms and that these networks exist early in a child’s development, varying in prominence among individuals. Thus, one child may be preprogrammed to be responsive to music and another to the visual arts.
At present we do not have the ability to determine which young child will be receptive to which form of the arts, suggesting that early arts exposure should be broad. How might this exposure work? Exposure to an art form may strengthen the “art neural network,” and this change may be expressed by a child’s motivation.
That motivation, in turn, may strengthen networks involved in attention and the self-regulation of behavior. These improved attention networks could be involved in better performances in other cognitive areas.
Posner’s research group has started to ask to what extent the development of these networks are under genetic control. Are some children innately more responsive to music than others? He is getting at the old “nature versus nurture” interaction. The brain of one child might respond to and be changed by music, while that of another may be unresponsive. In the future, we might be able to identify the genes regulating this difference.
Researchers fine-tune experimental factors
As in many experiments involving humans, complexities arise with the control groups, who will have had many varied musical experiences of their own. Suffice it to say that asking about the effect of music on a child’s brain begs the question, “compared to whom?” Adjustments also have to be made for a subject’s education and intelligence, and for social and economic factors.
Would a little boy spending equal time learning to play soccer or a computer game do just as well as the one learning to play the violin? In Spelke’s experiments the soccer players did not show enhanced abilities on the abstract geometry task.
The toughest question relates to the difference between causation and association. Does exposure to music change the brain, or does pre-existing brain wiring make one responsive to the effects of music? Comparisons of selfselected musicians versus non-musicians may show differences, but it may be that these differences were present from the beginning. Prospective studies in which young children are randomized into music and non-music groups and followed over time would be an ideal, but difficult to implement, study design.
Gazzaniga and his co-investigators are to be congratulated on taking on an important question and approaching it with scientific rigor. As is often the case, these preliminary studies have raised more questions than they have answered. They have also indicated paths of research not previously explored. Further advances will require interaction between researchers such as those in this consortium and members of the education community.
We need to go beyond the nostrum that “music is good for the brain” and demonstrate how and to what extent exposure to music enhances specific aspects of cognition, and in whom. These studies are a first step.