- "Wagner's music is better than it sounds,"
Mark Twain famously said. Parents whose children take music lessons can
now say the same: Canadian research shows that children who study music
will see their IQ increase faster than those who do not.
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- The study, published in the journal Psychological Science,
shows that children who took piano or voice lessons for an entire school
year had an additional gain of almost three points more on IQ tests than
the average increase a child not taking music lessons would experience.
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- "Music lessons, taught individually or in small
groups, may provide additional boosts in IQ because they are like school
but still enjoyable," said Glenn Schellenberg, the author of the study
and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto at the Mississauga
campus.
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- "Moreover, music lessons involve a multiplicity
of experiences that could generate improvement in a wide range of activities."
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- The researcher was quick to add, however, that he does
not believe there is anything about music that makes children magically
more intelligent, and that parents should not take the study to mean that
their children should study music to the exclusion of other activities.
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- "Honestly, I think children could get the same effect
from reading or playing chess, but we didn't study those," Dr. Schellenberg
said. "And there are benefits you're going to get from playing soccer
that you won't get from playing the piano."
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- To conduct the study, 144 children were recruited through
a newspaper ad offering free weekly arts lessons to six-year-olds. Those
children were randomly assigned to four different groups: keyboard lessons,
voice lessons, drama classes, or no lessons. (The children getting no lessons
were offered them free of charge the next year, after the study was completed).
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- Children underwent a battery of psychological tests,
including intelligence quotient tests, before and after the lessons, which
lasted an entire school year.
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- The study revealed that, during the academic year, the
average IQ scores of the children in all four groups increased -- but those
taking music lessons had the sharpest rise.
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- The IQ of children taking voice lessons rose 7.5 points,
to an average of 111.4 from 103.8. Among children taking keyboard lessons,
the rise was 6.1 points, and with those taking drama it was 5.1 points.
The IQ of children who took no lessons rose 3.9 points.
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- Dr. Schellenberg said he was not surprised by the findings.
"I think what you're seeing is the beneficial effect of more schooling."
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- He said research has repeatedly shown that school attendance
bolsters IQ and that instruction is particularly effective when it is done
in small groups, as with music and drama.
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- The researcher said that IQ scores don't tell the whole
story. For example, the children who studied drama had big improvements
in their social skills, something not seen in the music group.
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- The association between music and intelligence has been
the subject of heated academic discussion for a number of years.
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- More than a decade ago, Frances Rauscher of the University
of Wisconsin made international headlines with her finding that listening
to Mozart triggered temporary increases in spatial intelligence.
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- The so-called Mozart effect spawned a lot of research
and a whole subculture of parents playing Mozart music for their babies,
even when they are in utero.
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- Dr. Schellenberg has published papers that challenge
the existence of a Mozart effect. He said the new study is a separate line
of research, one which examines whether music, and music lessons in particular,
have benefits that extend to the non-musical part of the brain.
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