Music Training Aids Verbal Memory

` MUSIC INSTRUCTION AIDS VERBAL MEMORY Those piano lessons pay off in unexpected ways: According to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the... More

` MUSIC INSTRUCTION AIDS VERBAL MEMORY Those piano lessons pay off in unexpected ways: According to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the training, the better the verbal memory. These findings underscore how, when experience changes a specific brain region, other skills that region supports may also benefit –- a kind of cognitive side effect that could help people recovering from brain injury as well as healthy children. The research appears in the July issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90 boys between age six and 15. Half had musical training as members of their school’s string orchestra program, plus lessons in playing classical music on Western instruments, for one to five years. The other 45 participants were schoolmates with no musical training. Less