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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-11-18
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2sqXbwlaWw
mmhm music spite of all of our lives how did that make you feel maybe take you back to childhood remind you remember you hadn't thought of in awhile maybe maybe one leg get up out of a chair and golfer on the stage right so have you ever thought to think why why does music do all these things for us any particular what's going on in our
brain we make or listen to music well turns out a lot is going on in our brains this picture here is a brain scan a musician a pianist improvising from the work of Charles limb and the red and blue show areas of activation and deactivation during this musical performance what I want you to see just how much of the brain it's touched by music because of
this scientists like myself really feel that we can use music is a great tool to help us understand the brain but also the changes many people wondered well does music did good things for the brain is a good exercise for the brain critically for kids well there's a lot of research growing research showing that music can improve math skills reading even school attendance confidence as we
talked about earlier today I still question what is actually what is music changing in the brain that enables those improvements to happen thread like to talk to you about a study the symphony study let's ask outright answer that question before that in the twenty twenty vision of looking ahead to the future alike to sketch out a vision of education informed by brain will be know about
the brain to help people make their greatest greatest potential so consider what that would be like imagine genie a five year old going to the doctor for an annual checkup okay like all of us will have her height and weight measured and the doctor will show her and her parents where she falls on growth charts of height and weight we've all seen these in fact the
World Health Organization publishes worldwide growth charts the use of standards to help us plan nutrition both for individuals and society but what about kids minds and brains where is the growth chart for that what if in twenty twenty the doctor could measure genius brain and what if we had growth charts of the brain so that he could plot out the growth of different functions in different
areas of our brain maybe some things are ahead of the curve but circuit axle or area why maybe that's a little bit behind what we do with that knowledge what if we also knew that something like music could actually impact different brain areas because of its all encompassing nature and might specifically help brain areas develop we could use that knowledge that perhaps suggest the genie take
a violin and orchestra or sing in a choir how we gonna get to that point still a long way but it's an exciting time in science right now we have brain imaging and we're starting to sketch out the developmental path of the brain for example this work here is from a group here in San Diego led by Terry Jernigan the pink project measured the brains of
over a thousand people across the country from age to twenty two and sketches out these curves of area and thickness of the cortex the outer wrinkled part of our brains and these black line shows how the average growth the average projected growth of these things and people but each bottle that graph is a person an individual and we really care about what's happening to their brains
what happens to them next year the year after take the thickness charts it decreases it's an apparent measure at degrees and it's a good thing and kids because that actually reflects greater growth of connections into the cortex what about someone appeared was relatively immature cortical thickness well happen to them next well they just follow the same path of their arm and remain sort of behind the
curve for their age or they catch up converge down to the me and what impact would that have on this child's growing set of skills and is there anything we can do to change this to make one scenario turn into the other well this leads us to the big questions how is it to our individuality the constellation of skills talents likes dislikes how does not depend
on our brain exact developmental path that our brain is taken versus someone else's and in particular what can we do inexperience to shape the development the brain so you know little questions like that these questions will take many years maybe the lifetimes to answer because they really are the question of the seed of individuality but we're starting to make progress on them a another study at
UCSD by the same group playing the longitudinal cousin of paying I started to look at %HESITATION brain growth over a period of five years a group of two hundred kids starting age five to ten and that's where I come in I had the great fortune to be able to piggyback a study on this playing study a study of music we ask the question what does music
experience do for growth of the brain this will enable us to answer questions like well does music really target specific areas of circuits of the brain and if so how does that link up to increased abilities in other domains so that's the symphony study it's not misspelled we partnered with the fed you you've symphony their community opus program to Luke Smith spoke about that earlier %HESITATION
if you weren't here it's a fantastic youth program intensive orchestral training so many of our music kids come from that program now in the scientific you know kinda universe these days multimillion studies of five years of brain growth for music it's not quite on the national radar yet of NIH %HESITATION but I there are some you know forward looking foundations that enabled this project get started
%HESITATION and in particular that encourage you to look up you see merci which is a new %HESITATION you see president's office funded initiative across the state to improve music cognition research so here's the structure of the study we start off a baseline before anyone starts music and we measure kids a baseline and then every year for five years we measure a series of behavioral measures and
bring measures and we look for the connections and at this point were about half way through in fact we have about a hundred kids that we have two years of measurements on so music is a big thing right we can't really just look at what is the effect of music that makes us that so what we've done is focused on rhythm and this is not an
arbitrary choice %HESITATION in terms of actual skills turns on the rhythm correlates with many things like language attention good place to start we developed some tests of rhythm using this little guy Weibo who's on a musical journey and kids kind of fall along with him and see how well he's doing so one test the beat perception are booted of perceive to be and I'd like us
to try it out now okay the question is is we both playing along on the beat of the music and beeps and just listen to decide how is he doing a great job right and yes I do have to admit we subjected these tender kids to eighties rock music here's another example unexpected outcome came out of this on the second year lots of kids came back
and remember bleep though when he was doing just as badly in here too as he was in your water they said people really needs to practice harder didn't get any better okay here some results these are results from a test active tapping accuracy tapping along with a metronome %HESITATION this shows at baseline all of the students that we have the hundred that we have two years
of data on and it shows that you better accuracy improves over time I show my the black line the blue dots are control kids without music red dots are kids who are learning music now what happens in your to our kids gonna fall that same average curve or will they be more variation of course growing up a lease right there's variation all over the place some
kids get better some kids get worse okay but in particular looking at the music kids %HESITATION we see that in many cases Tom watch it all cases they're getting better spy was really unexpected fighting is not that mess with the music kids get better faster on the whole but they just get better more consistently then the control group and the other thing is that we found
lots of people who got a lot better than would be expected just by the normal age progression important we also found that these music kids did better on various tests of language perception connected with the synchronization but the real question is how this is depend on the brain what's going on in the brain here's an example of another fighting we found that last test that you
did beat perception tests turns out this area of cortex it isn't responsible for motor planning and motor execution predicts how well people do on the beat perception test so even if we take out all that age variation I still have this predictive relationship so larger motor cortex improves beat perception or at least is correlated with arms that's pretty neat we've got up for such a process
is being shaped in influence perhaps by motor cortex so it'll take us a few more years to really confident of these findings until we know for sure if it's music that's enlarging the cortex or this may be some kind of inbuilt variability but the sooner we get there let's go back to our friend Jeannie she returns the doctor two years later for next brain check up
and he finds it those areas that they had targeted with music are doing or doing fine they're back on track so I'd like to end their and just the just kinda remind you music it's important I think %HESITATION and musical kids seems like a good combination what is important remember that music training isn't necessarily just for training great musicians like we've seen earlier arm it can
