How playing the ukulele benefits your brain

This was a recent TED-Ed Article: How playing an instrument benefits your brain – Anita Collins Watch the video here:

And read the transcript here: Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments there are fireworks going off all over their brain?On the outside they may look calm and focused, reading the music in making the precise and practiced movements required, but inside their brains there’s a party going on!

How do we know this? Well in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time, with instruments like an FMRI and PET scanners. When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks such as reading or doing math problems each have corresponding areas of the brain, where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into unified musical experience. And our brains do all this work in the split-second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along.

But when scientists turned from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a Jubilee! It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is your brains equivalent of a full body workout. The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated and astonishingly fast sequences. But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? The research is still fairly new but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory and motor cortices. And as with any other workout, disciplined structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities.

The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it, is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision in which the left hemisphere is more involved with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. For these reasons playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brains corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively in both academic and social settings. Because making music also involves crafting and understanding it’s emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function. A category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing and attention to detail, and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work, and indeed musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions. Creating, storing and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently.

Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag and a contextual tag. Like a good internet search engine. So how do we know that all these benefits are unique to music, as opposed to say, sports or painting? Or could it be that people go into music were already smarter to begin with? Neuroscientists have explored these issues, but so far they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument are different from any other activity studied, including other arts. And several randomised studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others. This recent research about the mental benefits of playing music, has advanced our understanding of mental function, revealing the inner rhythms and complex interplay that make up the amazing orchestra of our brain.

Additional Resources for you to Explore Research into the nature of how the corpus callosum impacts on the brains functions, and how learning a musical instrument impacts on this, is ongoing. Recently, neuroscientists have dug deeper and found that changes in the corpus callosum may be dependent on the type of musical training a musician does and could be localized to the anterior corpus callosum. This area has shown an increase in bi-manual coordination (where the brain coordinates simultaneous multiple movements like using a knife and fork). Here is some of the latest research. 

Sometimes it is hard to explain all of this research to someone else so here is a short video you can share with others, about how music education can enhance brain development.

Learning to sing or play a musical instrument can help disadvantaged children improve their reading skills, US research suggests.

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I knew this stuff already. My memory capacity has increased since playing the ukulele, and my fine motor skills have become better. I certainly feel less dyspraxic when playing the ukulele. Does this appeal to you? What better time to book those ukulele lessons?