Researchers have wondered if “listening to comforting music, as a response to a social loss experience, provides a sense of empathic company as indicated by reduced loneliness and heightened empathy.” Is a pandemic, such as the one we are living through at the moment, a form of social loss? If we look at social media, […]

Is it nature or nurture? Is it biological, magic or a quirk? One of the musical prodigies involved in the BRAMS study in Canada into the cognitive predispositions for musical genius explained the mixture that she believes contributed to her extraordinary musical ability. “Our success is like the three legs of a grand piano,” says […]

Here is a fascinating new theoretical paper about the relationship between rhythm and language abilities. A theoretical study is one that brings together all the relevant current research and puts forward a theory of, in this case, how two concepts may be connected. In the diagram below you will see the researchers have put forward […]

Working memory is our temporary storage unit for information. It is the folder we put our daily timetable in, what we need to take with us to work or school. It is emptied at the end of the day and very little of it is committed to our more permanent memory systems. What types of […]

It is hard to conceptualise that our brain waves can be in sync or out of sync. Yet this concept of brain wave synchronisation is fascinating neuroscientists as they are finding that the more consistent the synchronisation, meaning the longer our brain waves can stay in sync, the more effectively we can learn. To explain […]

Have you been listening to music as you get your daily exercise in during COVID-19? Have you found yourself changing your music choices during this troubling time, maybe to lighten your mood or help you focus more on your exercise and less on these uncertain times? Here is a bit of a left-field article for […]

Music is food for the brain and, consequently, the food of neuroscience. Studying how the brain processes music and how music changes the brain has fascinated neuroscientists for almost 30 years. But these two types of studies, how the brain processes music and how music changes the brain, are also very difficult. “The problem is […]

Do you use background music when you are completing a creative task? If you do, do you find that your creative output is better, more innovative or unexpected, or does the background music hinders these outputs? In this study, the researchers used four conditions, meaning four different options for background sounds. These were background music […]

While we often bring you great research on the many skills and benefits music learning can provide, there is another very important part to the neuromusical research field – enhancing our understanding of various learning disorders and delays. In this excerpt from a brilliant conceptual paper, the study of musician’s brain structures and functions acts […]