Let's Play Music With Allison Browning: 2011

"Stanford University research has found for the first time that musical training improves how the brain processes the spoken word, a finding that researchers say could lead to improving the reading ability of children who have dyslexia and other reading problems.

The study, made public Wednesday, is the first to show that musical experience can help the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language.

The research also eventually could provide the "why" behind other studies that have found that playing a musical instrument has cognitive benefits.

"What this study shows, that's novel, is that there's a specific aspect of language ... that's changed in the minds and brains of people with musical training," said researcher John Gabrieli, a former Stanford psychology professor now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

"Especially for children ... who aren't good at rapid auditory processing and are high-risk for becoming poor readers, they may especially benefit from musical training."

What's promising about the study, researchers believe, is the notion that the brain isn't an immutable organ fixed at birth but is adaptable -- that, with training, people can change their mental agility. The study focused on adults, but researchers want to expand the scope of their work to children as early as next summer.

All the research was performed at Stanford in 2004 and was presented Wednesday at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. It will be published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in December.

The researchers used adults -- from 28 to 40 individuals, depending on the part of the study -- divided into musicians and non-musicians matched by age, sex, general language ability and intelligence. To qualify, the musicians must have started playing an instrument before age 7 and never stopped, practicing several hours every week.

Researchers first had the two groups listen to three tone sequences of different pitches in rapid succession. As the various tone sequences were played faster and faster, the musicians outperformed the non-musicians in their ability to distinguish among the tones. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scanners, or fMRIs, showed that the musicians had more focused, efficient brain activity as they did this.

The researchers then examined how musicians and non-musicians processed similar word syllables, like "da" and "ba." A person has only a 40,000th of a second to differentiate between the two sounds when the physical signal hits the ear, and the musicians made those rapid auditory distinctions more accurately and quickly than non-musicians did.

November 17, 2005|By Carrie Sturrock, Chronicle Staff Writer