Wednesday, June 7, 2023 | Uncategorized

I’ve just been reading about a recent study conducted by psychologists at the University of Bath. They conducted a randomised controlled trial to see what effects learning to play music for just a few weeks had on cognitive abilities.

The 31 adults in the study, who had no prior musical training, had either piano lessons for 1 hour per week for 11 weeks, assigned music listening (to listen to the same music the first group learnt to play), or were put into a control group to complete ‘homework’. The group who had the lessons reported significant improvements in recognising audio-visual changes in the environment (improved audio-visual synchrony perception).

Dr Petrini (co-author)  from the University of Bath explained: “Learning to play an instrument like the piano is a complex task: it requires a musician to read a score, generate movements and monitor the auditory and tactile feedback to adjust their further actions. In scientific terms, the process couples visual with auditory cues and results in a multi-sensory training for individuals. The findings from our study suggest that this has a significant, positive impact on how the brain processes audio-visual information even in adulthood when brain plasticity is reduced.”

I think this is really interesting as this study has been conducted in adults. The Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada has previously published data on the positive effects of music learning in children, and I hope that the team at Bath can conduct and publish some more research in this area.

The published article can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-23340-4

Tweet