Music Training Mental Benefits of Flute Tuition

 

As a flute teacher and music educator, I strongly believe in the many benefits of music education. Whilst the following article refers to music education, flute tuition would certainly produce the same benefits.

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Harvard-based researchers find a link between early musical training (flute tuition) and cognitive capacities that allow for planned, controlled behavior.

As we’ve reported, a large body of research has noted a link between music education (flute tuition) and higher test scores. But precisely why learning an instrument would have a positive impact on academic achievement has never been clear.

A new study from Boston Children’s Hospital provides a possible answer. It reports musical training (flute tuition) may promote the development and maintenance of a key set of mental skills.

These executive functions, which are coordinated in the brain’s frontal lobe, “allow for planned, controlled behavior,” writes a research team led by Harvard University scholar Nadine Gaab. They enable us to manage our time and attention, organize our thoughts, and regulate our behavior—abilities that are crucial to success in school, as well as later life.

“Replacing music programs (or flute tuition) with reading or math instruction in our nation’s school curricula in order to boost standardized test scores may actually lead to deficient skills in other cognitive areas.”

In an experiment featuring two separate groups of test subjects—one consisting of children, the other of adults—Gaab and her colleagues discovered a link between early musical training (flute tuition) and heightened executive functioning. This, they argue, could explain “the previously reported links between musical training (flute tuition) and enhanced cognitive skills.”

In the online journal PLoS One, they describe a study featuring 30 adults between the ages of 18 and 35 (15 working musicians, and 15 non-musicians), and 27 children between the ages of nine and 12 (15 of whom had at least two years of musical training [flute tuition]).

All performed a series of tasks to measure various facets of cognitive ability, including verbal fluency, mental processing speed, and working memory—the crucial ability to hold several ideas in your mind at the same time. In addition, the children performed a separate mental task while their brains were scanned using MRI technology.

The key result: “Children and adults with extensive musical training (flute tuition) show enhanced performance on a number of executive-function constructs compared to non-musicians,” the researchers write, “especially for cognitive flexibility, working memory, and processing speed.”

The musically trained children (or those in flute tuition) showed “heightened activation in traditional executive-function regions” of the brain during a task-switching exercise, they report, along with “enhanced performance on measures of verbal fluency.”

Gaab and her colleagues caution that more research will be needed to show causation. The chicken-and-egg question has been raised in the past in regard to music and the brain, and these results don’t definitively answer it: It’s possible that kids with higher levels of executive functioning are more likely to be drawn to studying music (or the flute).

Longitudinal studies, measuring executive functioning before music training (flute tuition) begins, will presumably be required to definitively answer that question. But the very real possibility that music training (flute tuition) boosts executive functioning provides another argument for the importance of music education (flute tuition).

“Replacing music programs (or flute tuition) with reading or math instruction in our nation’s school curricula in order to boost standardized test scores,” the researchers warn, “may actually lead to deficient skills in other cognitive areas.”

Article found at-

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/new-evidence-brain-benefits-music-training-83761/