Neuroscientist to present findings linking music to everyday listening
task enhancement
By Wendy Leopold
EVANSTON, Ill. --- At a Feb. 20 press briefing at the American
Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual meeting, a
Northwestern University neuroscientist argued that music training has
profound effects that shape the sensory system and should be a
mainstay of K-12 education.
“Playing an instrument may help youngsters better process speech in
noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language
that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice,” says Nina
Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and
Communication Sciences at Northwestern University.
“Cash-strapped school districts are making a mistake when they cut
music from the K-12 curriculum,” says Kraus, director of the Auditory
Neuroscience Laboratory in Northwestern’s School of Communication.
At the AAAS meeting, Kraus presented her own research and the research
of other neuroscientists suggesting music education can be an
effective strategy in helping typically developing children as well as
children with developmental dyslexia or autism more accurately encode
speech.
“People’s hearing systems are fine-tuned by the experiences they’ve
had with sound throughout their lives,” says Kraus. “Music training is
not only beneficial for processing music stimuli. We’ve found that
years of music training may also improve how sounds are processed for
language and emotion.”
Researchers in the Kraus lab provided the first concrete evidence that
playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem’s
sensitivity to speech sounds. The findings are consistent with other
studies they have conducted revealing that anomalies in brainstem
sound encoding in some learning disabled children can be improved with
auditory training.
The Kraus lab has a unique approach for demonstrating how the nervous
system responds to the acoustic properties of speech and music sounds
with sub-millisecond precision. The fidelity with which they can
access the transformation of the sound waves into brain waves in
individual people is a powerful new development.
The neural enhancements seen in individuals with musical training is
not just an amplifying or volume knob effect,” says Kraus.
“Individuals with music training show a selective fine-tuning of
relevant aspects of auditory signals.”
By comparing brain responses to predictable versus variable sound
sequences, Kraus and her colleagues found that an effective or
well-tuned sensory system takes advantage of stimulus regularities,
such as the sound patterns that distinguish a teacher’s voice from
competing sounds in a noisy classroom.
They previously found that the ability of the nervous system to
utilize acoustic patterns correlates with reading ability and the
ability to hear speech in noise. Now they have discovered that the
effectiveness of the nervous system to utilize sound patterns is
linked to musical ability.
“Playing music engages the ability to extract relevant patterns, such
as the sound of one’s own instrument, harmonies and rhythms, from the
‘soundscape,’” Kraus says. “Not surprisingly, musicians’ nervous
systems are more effective at utilizing the patterns in music and
speech alike.”
Studies in Kraus’ laboratory indicate that music -- a high-order
cognitive process -- affects automatic processing that occurs early in
the processing stream. “The brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part
of the brain, is modified by our experience with sound,” says Kraus.
“Now we know that music can fundamentally shape our subcortical
sensory circuitry in ways that may enhance everyday tasks, including
reading and listening in noise.”
Kraus presented a paper on “Cognitive-Sensory Interaction in the
Neural Encoding of Music and Speech” as part of a panel on
music-language interactions in the brain at the American Association
for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Diego.
For more about the research of Northwestern University’s Auditory
Neuroscience Laboratory, visit the laboratory’s Web site at
www.brainvolts.northwestern.edu Wendy Leopold is the education editor. Contact her at
w-leopold@northwestern.edu http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/02/kraus.html Posted via email from Rob Carsello's Posterous
