Scientists have long studied the effects of music on the human brain. How does it affect mood? Does listening to a particular genre increase productivity? Should babies listen to Mozart? But now, researchers are looking into how studying music may improve one’s concentration, an area of increasing importance in our scattershot culture.
A team of Chilean academics has produced a study, published by the journal Heliyon, that suggests “musical training produces lasting improvements to a cognitive mechanism that helps individuals be more attentive and less likely to be distracted by irrelevant stimuli while performing demanding tasks.” The study asserts that the more years of training a subject had, the greater the ability he or she had to control his or her attention.
It should be noted that the study only establishes a correlation between music training and attentiveness, not a causation. Statisticians are all too familiar with spurious correlations and the dubious conclusions they can elicit.
But correlations, when rooted in a reasonable premise, can be a sound entryway for future research. This would seem to be the case with the Chilean study.
It still stands to reason, however, that learning and playing music is healthy for the brain, offering it some much needed exercise and freeing it from the innumerable attention traps in front of people nowadays.
The Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2016 that more than 6 million children in the U.S. have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. David Medina, one of the authors of the Chilean study, acknowledged that the study’s findings “could be useful...in strengthening the ability of ADHD individuals to manage distractions.”
The brain is such a mystery that it may be difficult for scientists to ever reach definitive findings about the link between music and cognitive development, let alone how such a link could treat attention-deficit disorders. But promising paths, such as the one identified by the Chilean research team, should be examined further. Additional research could illuminate more avenues for strengthening cognitive development.
For now, children with poor attention skills will still be well-served by a little musical instruction. It may be a critical tool for improving a child’s mental well-being. And, at the very least, it will be a much-needed reprieve from yet another screen.
First Published April 6, 2019, 4:00 a.m.
