This post is about a study published online which provides evidence "that music exposure facilitates neuroplasticity in rats." Basically, that "enriched sound environment" (i.e. music) helps aid recovery from brain damage. Unfortunately, there's no way to test this without first damaging the brains of the rats, which I'm still not sure how I feel about...
Everything I learn about music and the brain fascinates me. I wish I had time to learn more about it (maybe a topic for research in later study?) because I think it's extremely important. Music is so much more than entertainment, something all musicians already know, but studies like this one help give empirical evidence which proves this fact.
Allison,
ReplyDeleteGood find! Music and the brain is definitely a very interesting field, and there is much research currently out there. This is a good start to finding out more information about music and healing brain damage, too bad it can't be done without harming the rats...
This is going to sound very vague, but I once read about a piano performance major who ended up going to Harvard med school and listened to different types of classical music in the operating room because it helped him focus and perform better, as well as did research on the Mozart effect with his healing patients.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that though we, as musicians, understand the significance of music and music education, justifying it to administrations can be difficult because we still have a limited support from scientific in comparison to other core subjects. Perhaps this is what we need to focus on to come that much closer to really proving how important music really is.
This research just goes to show that music's effects are far reaching. I wish more people outside of our field would recognize the benefits music has beyond simply being an 'extracurricular' activity. Hopefully this type of research will continue, and demonstrate music's importance.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder if some other form of organized sounds would have produced the same or similar results.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds interesting, but be cautious when reading blogs that summarize research studies. If you really want to learn more about the potential results of a study, you have to go directly to the source(hopefully available in a peer-reviewed research journal). One lesson that may be learned from the initial outbreak of The Mozart Effect is that there is a tendency to oversimplify research data to create catchy and exciting taglines such as "music makes you smarter" (in that case, the oversimplifying was not done by the researchers but by external media sources). I'm not suggesting that this is what this author is trying to do, I just think it's worth noting. I'm happy to see that the source is listed on this blog, and that the author is a professor of music cognition. These are both good signs that the research study may be worth reading for more information.
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