Honest debate impels me to include points of view which do not match my own. In this regard here is an article in which it it stated that parents who invest in music lessons for their children, in the hope of improved academic ability, are wasting their money. Whether or not you agree with this does not change the fact that having instrumental lessons, not through love of music, but in the hope of improving other abilities does seem an odd approach – why not just study harder?
Category Archives: Neuroscience
Music and the Brain
I’ve lately become a great fan of the slightly inelegantly named webiste, Brainpickings. Today they posted on Facebook (don’t knock it – it’s not all egotism) a list of 7 Essential Books on Music, Emotion and the Brain. I feel that two titles have been unfairly omitted: Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body and Daniel Levitin’s The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature – both of these links lead to lead to Amazon’s ‘look inside’ feature.
Bilingualism – and also music…
I’ve always felt somewhat cool towards the oft-quoted links between Music & Maths, feeling that Music has more in common with Language(s). As neuroscience reveals an equal amount of our intuitions to have been either true or misguided, I was pleased to see this article about some recent research led by Nina Kraus – one of the most engaging speakers at last June’s Music/Neuroscience conference hosted by Edinburgh University. It suggests that bilingualism – and music – are advantageous when it comes to processing sound. Much of this comes to being able to block our distractions – increasingly necessary in our busy world.
Creativity
I recently came across two interesting posts on creativity. One from the excellent site, Brain Pickings, features a video of a talk by John Cleese. It features the attention-grabbing phrase, ‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’
The other, an article by Jonah Lehrer, is entitled The neuroscience of Bob Dylan’s Genius. I’ve never been a fan of Dylan but it’s a very interesting piece on the creative process.
On my reading lists which, by now, stretches further than years left to me on Earth, is Lehrer’s Proust Was A Neuroscientist.