Music Education and Executive Function - What Goes On

Kathleen M. Howland, Ph.D.

Music study group for Northborough-Southborough school district

There was a study in the 1990’s whose results were blown all out of proportion for the sake of a marketing dollar. This original experiment by Rauscher and Shaw (1993) saw an 8-9 IQ point gain just by listening to Mozart before a test (as compared to a group that heard verbal relaxation instructions and a control group of silence). The results from this experiment became known as the Mozart Effect. For marketers, this notion that your child could become smarter by listening to music exploded world wide in products and hype. All kinds of promises were made for great results if you would just let your fetus, infant and preschooler listen to Mozart. The scientists however were exploding in a different way. No other lab could replicate the results of this experiment and ultimately the Mozart Effect was given a Requiem (a death mass).

It makes no sense that background music could change your IQ. It’s just as unreasonable to expect that listening to foreign language recordings will make you bilingual. In language learning, great gains are made if you have to engage in listening and talking.

Gains in cognitive, executive functions (attention, reasoning, problem solving, sequencing, having insight, forecasting complications and consequences, impulse control, initiation of an activity) are a direct result of the intense work that musicians do every time they walk into a practice room. Executive functions are the highest form of cognition, the skills we seek to guide our lives, the ability to work, the maturation that makes for stability instead of reactivity in life. They are the skill sets that are responsible for the planning and regulation of behavior and cognition and is strongly correlated with academic abilities. So how does music fit in?

Picture this. A child around 12 goes to practice his clarinet. He heard what the teacher played as a model and that is what he’s going to work on first. He puts the 5 pieces of his clarinet together, making sure to be gentle with the middle joint. Then he wets a reed to put on the flat side of the mouthpiece. The reed sounds stuffy so he chooses to wet it again and reset it. He is now pleased with the sound.

He begins with the piece his teacher assigned him. He has an auditory memory for the piece and uses this as a pattern to assess how he is sight reading the notes for the first time. As he reads the notes on the paper, his eyes will go up and down to follow the rise and fall of pitch (this builds and enhances visual-spatial skills).

He hears something that didn’t fit the model in his head. He goes back to identify it. He backs up a couple of notes from there and slows down his approach into the problem note. He goes back and forth over this and then adds several more previous notes or perhaps the whole phrase at a slower, steady tempo. He makes the mistake once again.

So now he engages in a new technique he was taught for times like this. He uses imagery. He audiates (hears in his mind) the model his teacher played. He lets it play in his head and he follows along with the music. This helps to reprogram the way his brain programmed his fingers.

Another approach that he could have used is to put the clarinet down. While tapping his foot to the beat, he could clap and sing the rhythms. At a slow tempo, he should sing and clap it through a couple of times. Satisfied with this success, he will bump the tempo up 5% to increase the challenge. After a couple of these runs, he picks up the clarinet and tries again. He starts off slowly and then increases the tempo with each version. His hard work will pay off. He’s playing the passage accurately and up to tempo and it took less than 5 minutes to work through this problem area.

This type of work in the practice room is an important asset to building executive functions. Children learn to detect errors, solve problems, try varied approaches to a problem, demonstrate grit and persistence and maintain concentration for extended periods of time. The full maturation of executive functions will occur in his mid- to late-twenties. And yet, a twelve year old has mastered many key elements - well reasoned approaches to a problem, strategies to advance his skills, competency and satisfaction, always making a stretch and challenging oneself, grit and persistence, ability to work individually and independently in the practice room and then collaboratively in ensembles. This work at a young age creates tremendous, rich neural connections that will guide and serve their growth and development in adulthood.

Research by Zuk, et al. (2014) reported that the results of two experiments, one with adults and one with children, “support the working hypothesis that musical training may promote the development and maintenance of certain EF skills, which could mediate the previously reported links between musical training and enhanced cognitive skills and academic achievement.”

Music is so effective in training executive functions that it has been investigated with people who have cognitive issues related to Parkinson’s disease (Teresa Lesiuk, T., Bugos, J. & Murakami, B., 2018). In the case of Glen Campbell, who went on a 154 city tour after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the thick neural circuitry of his decades of practice may have proven to be neuroprotective. He was symptomatic of dementia for the previous ten years but was not diagnosed until the release of his last album. This is an uncharacteristically long, slow progression of the disease. Perhaps because Glen’s thick neural circuitry as a musician proved to be more like marble than soft sandstone.

Bibliography

d’Souza, A., Moradzadeh, L., & Wiseheart, M. (2018). Musical training, bilingualism and executive function: working memory and inhibitory control. Cognitive research: principles and implications, 3, 11

Lesiuk, T., Bugos, J. & Murakami, B., (2018).  A Rationale for Music Training to Enhance Executive Functions in Parkinson’s Disease: An Overview of the Problem. Healthcare 2018, 6, 35

Okada, B. M., & Slevc, L. R. (In Press). Musical training: Contributions to executive function. In M.Bunting, J. Novick, M. Dougherty, & R. W. Engle (Eds.), An Integrative Approach to Cognitive and Working Memory Training: Perspectives from Psychology, Neuroscience, and Human Development. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Zuk, J., Benjamin, C., Kenyon, A., Gaab, N. (2014). Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Executive Functioning in Musicians and Non-Musicians. Plus One, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099868