Music lessons build the child's brain in the same way that exercise builds muscles. A recent study done by Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard Medical School showed that children who learned to play a musical instrument registered definite changes in the brain versus children who did not.
Schlaug's team set up 2 groups of musically untrained six year olds from the Boston area. Half of them began weekly keyboard lessons for 15 months; the other half did not.
MRI scans on both groups at the end of the study showed that auditory and motor areas of the brain linked with hearing and dexterity grew larger in the musically trained group, but not in the control group. The musicians also outperformed the control group in specific tasks related to manual dexterity and discrimination of sounds.
There is no doubt that music lessons bestow tremendous benefit on the developing brain.
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