Despite popular belief, recent
studies have been shown that music does not affect cognitive thinking. Samuel Mehr, a Harvard graduate student, disproved this popular notion by
organizing some experiments with his colleagues. Mehr himself plays saxophone,
flute, bassoon, oboe, and the clarinet. Mehr and his company, the Harvard
psychology department, put together a research experiment to see if music
lessons aided in cognitive thinking. The team incorporated music lessons with visual
art lessons and tried to eliminate factors that could bias the result. They
randomly assigned four-year-olds and their parents to two different groups, and
Mehr taught both classes, which ran 45 minutes and went on for six weeks, to
ensure that the difference could not be accounted for by a more charismatic
teacher. Instead of overall intelligence Mehr and his crew tested on core
mathematical abilities, spatial navigation, and linguistic abilities. The
results yielded that music gave the kids a slight edge over kids not in the
program.
The test was performed once again
with a larger group of kids but could not produce the same result. The study
does not rule out that music has no effect at all, but rather suggests more
classes to see any astonishing results. Mehr stated, “The take home message
from these two particular studies themselves is we should be really cautious
about making positive claims about cognitive benefits of music education.”
Ellen
Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, noted that the direct benefits
of music are unclear as of now. But until till that day comes, keep rocking.
\m/
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