The Science behind Musical Training & Enhanced Intelligence

by John Alica Marketer

The ‘Mozart Effect’ gets a new take by scientists who now find developments that support a link between classical musical training and enhanced intelligence in kids.

While the most famed Austrian pianist and composer, Mozart, enthralled fans with his symphonies and musical genius, he also managed to intrigue the mind of intellects.

The Mozart Effect

In the later years, long after the death of the man himself, scientists were claiming that there existed a connection between Mozart’s pieces of music and intelligence in babies. They called this the “Mozart Effect”.

The idea states that children – including toddlers and unborn – become more intelligent if they are regularly exposed to Mozart’s music in the form of symphonies, operas, and concertos. Unfortunately, in 2005, with numerous researches, this assumption was dispelled. While listening to Mozart or any other piece of classical music has some small impact on short term cognitive abilities, it has no long term effects, whatsoever. The operative word, here, is listening.

However, the interest in the links between music and cognitive enhancement had been triggered and this spawned a series of studies in this subject.

The Brain & Music

The Mozart effect may have been nullified. However, there was one significant aspect that was a ray of light. The short term cognitive impact, as a result of listening to Mozart and classical music was really a general mood enhancer.

Could proper musical training have a deeper and long-standing impact, asked scientists. Turns out, it does.

Multiple studies followed that proved that learning to play an instrument in an early age induces long-term cognitive benefits in terms of intelligence, memory, language, and visual-spatial processing. One study found that children between 4-5 years of age who received musical training lessons, displayed improved cognitive functioning than their peers who received no training.

Musical Training & the Oscillatory Senses

Musical training impacts the oscillatory connections in the brain that are related to reasoning, forming work memory and other multi-tasking and problem solving abilities. Children with longer durations of training in music tend to show long lasting and superior performance in these domains that they carry well into adulthood. They are better at learning new languages as well.

Impact on the Auditory and Visual Senses

A sustained and regular musical training has a demand over the dynamic senses – the auditory and visual. This goes on to enhance performance and the ability of an individual to learn. Scientists go further to believe that this enhancement in cognitive thinking helps them to develop and interpret abstract concepts well, increasing non-verbal IQ.

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