<p>Interesting article in the Times
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/is-music-the-key-to-success.html?_r=0%5B/url%5D">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/is-music-the-key-to-success.html?_r=0</a></p>
<p>This is interesting,there are a lot of successful people with music backgrounds out there, it always amazed me when an actor turned out to have studied classical singing or someone else had background. Sadly,I suspect people if you showed them this would shrug and say so what,yet the same people would scream that sports programs shape kids,make them better at teamwork and such,build character (I leave the irony of that one,being near the training facility of an nfl team, our local paper has a lot of fun with it)…we had that happen in our town,when budget discussions for the local high school came up,the tea party types were arguing that music and are were ‘frills’, yet same type said sports shouldn’t be cut because it is ‘valuable’ (note,no one from the school ever made it into the pros, several have made it as working musicians).</p>
<p>Put it this way,I suspect music teaches more about teamwork and dealing with people than sports do,and one thing music teaches is that effort=tangible rewards, that practice=better playing, better than sports where it seems to appear to be talent>effort…</p>
<p>Interesting article.
Personally I think music help your brain work better.</p>
<p>I highly recommend the book that Ms. Lipman co-wrote that is mentioned at the end of the article…a great read for anyone, not just musicians. (“Strings Attached”)</p>
<p>There are probably a lot of reasons music influences people in a positive way, the article mentions the kind of collaboration skills, the discipline it takes and so forth, and others have talked about what it does for the mind and such. Besides the book recommended, I also recommend Daniel Lativin’s book “Your brain on music”.</p>
<p>No.
It is correlated it. Music is am amazing <em>artifact</em> of human intelligence, not a cause of it.</p>
<p>The claims that music makes geniuses, the so called Mozart effect and such, were marketing ploys to sell to uptight baby boomer parents who felt if everything wasn’t done, their kid would be a loser, etc…</p>
<p>That said, music does influence the shaping of the brain and isn’t just an artifact of our intelligence. Daniel Lativin is studying this (he is a neuroscientist with a background in music), as has Oliver Sachs and others, and what they have found out is that music stimulates multiple areas in the brain (the old right brain stuff is not really true), and actually can influence how the mind develops and is shaped in differing ways. </p>
<p>Does that mean to create a genius play them mozart or baroque music and that is the answer? Nope. Does it mean that listening and playing music changes the person who does so? Does it heighten some senses, does it change perceptions, perhaps even the way we think at times? Yep, and that is actually backed up, unlike the mozart effect.</p>