Children Learning Musical Growing Smarter

Jakarta, In order for children to be great musicians like Mozart or Beethoven, some parents enroll their children tend to be encouraged to take music lessons or learn a particular instrument. It might seem that the effort would only waste time, but a new study claims that learning a musical instrument to make the child grow up to be more intelligent.
In detail, a team of researchers from Canada revealed that encourages children to class music since the age of 6 years will accelerate the development of motor skills.


"Because learning a musical instrument that requires coordination between the two hands with visual stimuli (visual) or audio (hearing) in the brain. Yet if the learning process has been carried out before the age of 7 years, it will tend to accelerate the maturation process of the connection between the motor and sensory regions in in the brain so as to create the foundations of a good musical training for children, "said lead researcher Virginia Penhune, professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
"Even the young age of the child when learning a musical instrument then the connectivity between the two aspects of it will get better," he said as quoted by the Daily Mail, Saturday (16/02/2013).
The conclusion was obtained after 36 brain researchers observed that the average musician had played music in the same period and underwent a number of tests to determine the non-musical motor skills.
Participants were divided into two groups: participants who started learning music before the age of 7 years and after studying music. Then the results were compared with the results of tests on other participants (not the musician) who had received little formal musical training or no training at all.
From there it is known that the musicians who had been studying music since the age of 7 years was barely able to determine the timing (when learning a musical instrument) are more accurate, even after training in two days, compared to his fellow musicians or the participants who had never practiced a musical instrument before.
At the same time, brain scans of musicians who studied music since childhood shows the addition of the white part of the corpus callosum in the brain. Corpus callosum itself is a group of nerve fibers that connects the left and right brain.
But the brain scans of participants not musicians and musicians who studied music after 7-year-old did not show any differences in brain development.
Nevertheless, Professor Penhune reminded that the course of this instrument does not necessarily change the kids into classical music composers or musicians for piano or violin was not so great impact on the development of children's ability as a musician because of differences in the specific skill and brain condition that follows.
Just because a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience is also testing motor skills in a non-musical participants, researchers may argue that the benefits of learning a musical instrument is more than able to play any musical instrument.