Media Reports

 
Excerpt from "The Sunday Times" - 12 October 1997 (U.K.)
By Cherry Norton ( Originally In English)

Key Qualities: Vitie Graham practises the piano daily. Her mother believes the playing has improved her self-confidance and concentration.
Tuned in: music lifts exam results at Wells Cathedral school

Teaching the music of Mozart or Beethoven to children as young as three can improve their academic performance, new research has revealed. Scientists have proved that children who practice for as little as 10 minutes a day on the piano score dramatically higher results in intelligence tests.

The researchers have shown that playing music at this age, when brain connections are formed more easily, produces a long-term improvement in how a child reasons and thinks. They believe that regular practice modifies the "hard wiring" in parts of the upper brain, thought to be responsible for creative and intellectual ability.

Gordon Shaw, professor of physics at the University of California Irvine, who carried out the study, said the implications of this work were important both to parents and teachers.

"We have shown that in some way training them in music at three or four is improving the way in which their brains recognized patterns in space and time," he said.

"We believe there is a common neural language that comes from some underlying structure in our brains. It is not only seeing patterns but sequences of patterns.

"Little children are exposed to stimuli and they respond to them, but the idea of being able to think ahead and form mental images and process that in their heads is something they do not do. Certain types of music seem to promote their ability to do this."

The children who took part in the study learnt simple melodies by Beethoven and Mozart, who started composing at the age of five. "We taught them Mozart because somehow we feel the magical genius of Mozart taps into this inherent structure in the brain," Shaw said, "The music flowed from him; he was a natural composer who did not have to struggle over each note."

Shaw first tested the abilities of 78 children aged three and four by recording the speed and accuracy with which they put together a four-part jigsaw of a camel. The children were then divided into three groups. One group was given piano lessons, the second had computer lessons and the third group received no training at all.

After nine months, the children's abilities were tested again. The children who had taken piano lessons showed a dramatic improvement; their scores leapt 35% compared to little or no improvement in the other two groups.

Although the benefits of teaching children music have long been suggested, this is the first evidence that music training actually improves intellectual ability.

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