Improved brainpower could just be music to babies ears

A new study just released is saying that listening to music, at least a certain kind of music, may help improve the brain’s power to process music patterns and speech sounds in infants, according to a story on UPI.

Earlier research has identified what has become known as the “Mozart effect,” the theory that music in early childhood could yield positive results in the development of children’s brains, but studies on the subject have provided more questions than answers.  The authors of this new study say those mixed results could have been caused by the design of the earlier studies.

Study lead author T. Christina Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, said, “Actively participating in music may be another important experience that can influence infants’ brain development and help them learn.”

A total of 39 nine-month-old babies were involved with the new research, with 19 making up a control group that played with toys during sessions of 15 minutes each for a month.  The other 20 babies in the group were provided with recordings of children’s music, as they were led by a researcher in tapping out the rhythms with their parents.

“All the songs were in triple meter, like in a waltz, which the researchers chose because they’re relatively difficult for babies to learn,” added Zhao.

After the sessions were completed, the babies were tested with brain scans while listening to a series of music and speech sounds, with an intentionally disrupted break in the rhythm.  Zhao said, “The babies’ brains would show a particular response to indicate they could detect the disruption.”

The findings show the babies that were in the group that had been exposed to music in the study had a better ability to respond to the disruptions in the rhythms of the music and speech patterns.  Zhao added the study results had broadened their understanding of how infants learn speech sounds and she continued to say the findings shed some light on the fact that the brain could be processing music and speech sounds in a similar way.

The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week.