Composing Music Increases the Brain's Language Skills

Roy Elal

7B

http://www.suite101.com/content/music-and-its-effect-on-the-brain-a209609

March 16, 2010

This article, was about how making music, or just playing/singing it help the brain's language skills. This discovery of how music helps the brain's language skills, happened in March this year (2010).

According to new research, Musicians; from professional violin players to professional drum players, have a trained ear,

in a way, so they can hear special background noises they focus on, which is one way of proving the new (March this year)

discovery that making music helps the brain's language skills. During this discovery, brain imagine studies show that music,

activates many contrary parts of the brain, involving an overlap where the brain processes music and language. During this

experiment, the scientists had shown that when a person listens to a sound, the brain wave recorded in response is

physically the same as the sound wave itself, in fact, "playing" the brain wave produces an almost identical sound. But for

people without a trained ear for music, the ability to hear some of these targeted background noises. Musicians,

by contrast, have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns,

even as background noise goes up. "Something similar to this would be, like learning to drive a

manual transmission car, when you first learn to drive a car, you think about the stick shift, the

clutch, and all the other different parts-- but once you understand, your body know how to drive a

car almost automatically." Adir Elal (my dad). At the same time as this, people with certain

development disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds among loud noises ---an

example of this would be; for students having a hard time to hear their teacher in class. This type of

musical experience could aid children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Stroke

patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing

them first. Some scientists (names were unavailable) demonstrated the results of intensive musical

therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with

language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent

sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases

and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," song, recite their

addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. The underdeveloped systems on the right side

of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures.

All-in-all, this article, was quite interesting, learning about how music could help people with language dyslexia, i think thats pretty awesome, and would definitely be very helpful towards those people who suffer from these disabilities, and definitely helpful towards the people who nurture them. I think the experiments show that music might be an alternative medium for engaging parts of the brain that are pretty much not engaged.