Early Music Lessons Have Longtime Benefits

A ” study published last month is the first to show that music lessons in childhood may lead to changes in the brain that persist years after the lessons stop … musical training improves the brain’s ability to discern the components of sound — the pitch, the timing and the timbre. ‘To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections,’ said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. ‘Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument.’….”