Music: The brain's gym

Did you know that when a musician plays an instrument, a party breaks out in their brain? A recent study by Dr. Anita Collins shows us the numerous benefits that playing a musical instrument has for our brains. With the scientific advances of recent decades, it is now possible to analyze a person's brain activity in real time while performing a task. Neuroscientists were surprised to discover how playing an instrument activates almost the entire brain, making it one of the best brain exercises available. It stimulates both the right and left hemispheres of the brain, as well as the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres. It has been shown to improve memory, academic and social problem-solving, planning, strategy formulation, and attention to detail, among many other factors. We knew about the importance of music in children's development, but we didn't realize it could be such an enriching and complete activity. It's truly a complete gym for our brains. If you haven't already, I invite you to check out our musical toys section to introduce your little ones to the world of music... and brain gymnastics ;-) We've provided the full video explaining it here . If you're not very comfortable with Shakespeare's language, you can read the full transcript below. Watch VIDEO

Did you know that every time musicians play their instruments, fireworks go off in their brains? On the outside, they may appear calm and focused, reading the music and executing the precise, practiced movements required, but inside their brains, there's a party going on! How do we know? Well, in recent decades, neuroscientists have made enormous strides in understanding how the brain works, studying it in real time with fMRI and PET scanners. People are connected to these machines, and reading or solving math problems activate the corresponding parts of the brain where activity can be observed. When researchers had patients listen to music, they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of the brain lit up simultaneously as they processed melody and rhythm, and then merged them back together into a musical experience. Our brains do all this in the split second between when we hear the music and when we start tapping our feet to the beat. But when scientists switched from observing the brains of those listening to music to those playing it, the tiny fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that if listening to music engages the brain in some interesting activities, playing music is equivalent to a complete physical activity for the brain. Neuroscientists observed multiple brain regions that process different types of information light up simultaneously in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly rapid sequences. But what aspect of music ignites the brain? The research is still very early, but neuroscientists have some idea. Playing a musical instrument activates virtually the entire brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. And as with any other exercise, the disciplined and structured practice of music strengthens brain functions, allowing us to apply that power to other activities. The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it is that playing music requires fine motor skills, which are controlled by both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines linguistic and mathematical precision, for which the left hemisphere is more developed, with novel and creative content, which the right hemisphere excels at. For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain's corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to travel faster through more diverse pathways. This could allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in academic and social contexts. Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its message and emotional content, musicians often have higher levels of executive functions, a category of interrelated tasks that encompasses planning, strategizing, and attention to detail and requires simultaneous analysis of cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on memory function. In fact, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions: they create, store, and retrieve memories much more quickly and efficiently. Studies show that musicians seem to use their highly connected brains to label each memory with multiple tags: a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag, like a good internet search engine. How do we know these benefits are unique to music and not, say, sports or painting? Could it be that people who pursue music are already inherently smarter? Neuroscientists have explored these topics, but so far they have found that the artistic and aesthetic aspects of learning to play a musical instrument differ from any other activity studied, including other arts. In several randomized studies of participants who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at baseline, they found that those exposed to a period of musical learning showed improvements in multiple areas of the brain compared to the others. This recent research on the mental benefits of playing music has allowed us to better understand mental function, revealing the internal rhythms and complex interplay that make up our brain's incredible orchestra.