As people who read this blog at least semi-regularly know, I’m not a big fan of research that shows how studying music can help with algebra, spatial learning, and so on. Studies like that tend to place a higher value on learning algebra than they place on learning music, and that’s just not how it works.
But a study out of Northwestern University takes a slightly different tack. It’ll be published in tomorrow’s edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, but a press release for the study was available online, here, as of Friday.
Based on a study of more than 100 Chicago-area teenagers, researchers concluded that “people who are better able to move to a beat show more consistent brain responses to speech than those with less rhythm. … The findings suggest that musical training could possibly sharpen the brain’s response to language.”
In other words, we’re only in the first paragraph, and already, the press folks at the Society for Neuroscience have made that very bold leap from correlation to causation. A very informative study reaches some interesting conclusions and adds greatly to our understanding of both music and language processing in the brain, and someone in a press office goes and says the study suggests musical training can cause a sharper response in the brain to language.
Let me clarify. This study had teenagers listen to and tap along with a steady beat of a metronome. No music, just a click, click, click sound. Their accuracy was recorded.
Next, researchers hooked each student up to an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain. Someone then spoke the syllable “da” over and over in a rhythmic manner, within earshot of the student, and the electrical activity in the brain was recorded.
The electrodes, by the way, were concentrated on the parts of the brain that are known to be heavily recruited when the person is processing sounds.
The results were fairly predictable: Teenagers who more accurately matched the beat of a metronome in the first part of the study tended to show more electrical brain activity in the second part of the experiment than those who couldn’t tap along with the metronome. The reporter writes:
John Iversen, PhD, who studies how the brain processes music at the University of California, San Diego, and was not involved with this study, noted that the findings raise the possibility that musical training may have important impacts on the brain. “This study adds another piece to the puzzle in the emerging story suggesting that musical rhythmic abilities are correlated with improved performance in non-music areas, particularly language,” he said.
Please don’t take what the reporter wrote too seriously; pay attention to the quote itself. It’s a pretty long leap from electrical brain activity to reading or listening ability, and the study did not report how much “musical training” the teenagers had, just their accuracy on a simple task. Next thing you know, some for-profit company will sell schools metronomes for obscene prices and promote the “kit” as being aligned to the reading and listening standards in the Common Core’s language arts standards. Putting sloppy writing like this press release out there just makes it easier for people to shoot down the research, and this research, funded by the National Science Foundation, doesn’t deserve to be shot down so easily.
The study’s authors, while I’m sure they would be interested in the possibility of improving teenagers’ performance in non-music areas, did not in any way discover new insights into how studying music can help kids learn language. Rather, they confirmed a multitude of previous studies that show how neurons in certain areas of the brain are actively recruited to analyze sound, whether that’s a metronome or the rhythm of spoken language.
But look, if it were all bad, I wouldn’t even be writing about it. I’m bringing this study to your attention first to show that we can’t always trust press releases, even if they purport to tell us about a peer-reviewed journal article. The writers of press releases don’t always understand the science behind the studies, and pieces like this contribute to the vast wasteland that is today’s Internet. And second, I want to point out that even totally expected results need to be published. Studies that confirm our collective knowledge base are just as important as those that refute false claims. They’re just not as exciting.
Education itself is based on this latter principle of research: Although there are plenty of examples of kids whose education just didn’t work out, there are thousands more for whom education does exactly what we expect to prepare those students for careers, college, or wherever their dreams may take them. To suggest that the dreams of a reader are more valuable to society than those of a musician does a disservice to both reading and music.
Nina Kraus, PhD, and colleagues in the present study looked at the relationship between the ability to keep a beat and the brain’s response to sound. It was completely expected that teenagers who could move to a beat would show enhanced brain activity in the parts of the brain responsible for processing sound. Musical training may give those parts of the brain a workout, which might sensitize them to language and non-musical sounds, but my conclusion stops here: kids who are good at keeping a beat recruit more neurons when their brains process speech. It’s a long way from that to teaching kids to read, and in the meantime, kids are studying music and learning to read quite well without anyone mixing causation with correlation.