To keep a beat, our brains have to get the auditory and motor cortices to first synchronise and then maintain that synchronisation as small things change in the music. To maintain a rhythm, our brains need to do all of that plus constantly monitor how the rhythm is fitting into the beat. It looks easy, […]

Audio-visual integration is the integration of things we hear with the things we see. Why would this be important? Well, have you ever watched a video where the sound and picture are out of sync? Imagine that happening inside your own brain. Concentrating would be hard, let alone learning anything if most of the world […]

Music learning is studied in two basic ways with children – as a tool to understand and enhance typical brain development and a tool to improve delayed brain development that has been impacted by environmental or medical factors. These latter factors could be living in challenging circumstances due to loss of hearing from an accident […]

If you were to look at a standard weekly timetable for a kindergarten class, you would hopefully see at least one music learning class. This might be a 40, 50 or 60-minute class which, for 20 x 5-year-olds, would require a great deal of detailed planning by the teacher to maintain quality learning and engagement […]

Would a pianist make a better surgeon? Isn’t this a fascinating question? In a recent article in the journal Music and Medicine, a team of researchers studied a group of pianists to see if the benefits of learning piano translated into benefits when learning complex and refined motor skills in another domain, specifically surgical skills. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]