Music training might serve as an effective deterrent of or treatment for dyslexia and other language learning disorders, suggests a new study that explores how years of musical experience can boost the brain's hearing abilities.
It's not terribly surprising that musicians are better at processing sounds than the rest of us. What was unexpected, though, was that only certain specific aspects of hearing are affected, said study leader Dana Strait, a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University, speaking at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago on Monday. And those areas, it turns out, are the same ones that seem to go awry to children who have difficulty learning to read and write.
In her experiment, Strait had 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians play a simple video game she had adapted to test various hearing skills. The groups were pretty similar when it came to very basic tasks, such as what range of sounds they could hear or whether they could detect simple musical tones. The veteran musicians, however, showed increased abilities to focus on sounds and enhanced memory of them afterwards, Strait said, as well as improvements on a few more complicated listening tasks. Furthermore, this was directly related to the amount of musical experience; the longer a musician had played, the better his or her scores.
"Those very aspects enhanced in musicians are impaired in people with learning disabilities," Strait added. For instance, children with dyslexia often have trouble teasing out important sounds from background noise and with distinguishing between certain very similar English consonants. This suggests that reading- and language-related cognitive abilities might be boosted in children with musical training, she said.
This isn't the first research to connect music training and possible educational benefits. Several prior studies have hinted that musical training might convey substantial lifelong learning benefits not just for language but also for thinking in general. Michael Posner, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, earlier this year outlined one way this could might happen: Since musical training requires intense time commitments, it may enhance attention, or the ability to focus on one task despite competing demands. And at least one survey has found a rough correlation between SAT scores and prior musical experience, Mark Tramo of Harvard Medical School said at the conference.
But that work, as well as many other studies in the field, do not answer the question of what comes first--better hearing, better attention abilities or an interest in music--Tramo said. Do people born with brains more adept at sound processing or focus naturally decide to become musicians, or did their training boost those abilities? Such questions are vital to figuring out whether music can be employed to combat dyslexia, but because the field is so young, the long, large surveys needed to get answers have not yet been conducted, Tramo said.
Strait echoed those concerns, emphasizing that much more work remains to be done before any recommendations could be made about treatment. She may have some of those answers soon, though; in an interview, she said that this particular study is just one element of a larger project looking at music and the brain. The full plan includes studying not just adults but also children to decipher how precisely the brain processes speech and music, how this changes when people learn to read or write, how learning an instrument might differ from that and what changes the brain shows during the development of musical skill. She even plans to investigate whether the instrument played makes a difference--say, a piano versus a violin versus a set of drums.
--Aalok Mehta
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