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Tero Toivanen

Music and Intelligence | Boost Your IQ - 0 views

  • Studies indicate that early exposure to musical training helps a child’s brain reach its potential by generating neural connections utilized in abstract reasoning.
  • The reasoning skills required for a test in spatial reasoning are the same ones children use when they listen to music. Children use these reasoning skills to order the notes in their brain to form the melodies. Also, some concepts of math must be understood in order to understand music. Experts speculate that listening to music exercises the same parts of the brain that handle mathematics, logic, and higher level reasoning.
  • In 1997 a study involving three groups of preschoolers was conducted to determine the effect of music versus computer training on early childhood development.
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  • The group that received the piano/keyboard training scored 34% higher on tests measuring spatial-temporal ability than either of the other two groups. These results suggest that music enhances certain higher brain functions, particularly abstract reasoning skills, required in math and science.
  • The use of music in training four and five year old children yielded the highest improvement in the ability to name body parts.
  • Although the three experimental groups displayed an increase in their ability to name body parts the music group exhibited the highest degree of improvement.
  • First grade students received extensive Kodaly training for seven months.
  • At the end of seven months the experimental group had higher reading scores than the control group, which did not receive any special treatment. Not only did the seven month instruction increase reading scores, but continued musical training proved to be beneficial. The experimental group continued to show higher reading scores with continued training.
  • Students who were involved in arts education achieved higher SAT scores. The longer students were involved in arts education, the higher the increase in SAT scores. This study also correlated arts education with higher scores in standardized tests, reading, English, history, citizenship, and geography.
  • The results indicated that students with a relatively lower socioeconomic status, that were exposed to arts education, had an advantage over those students without any arts education which was proportionally equal to the students with a relatively higher socioeconomic status and exposure to arts education.
  • Music exposure affects older students as well. Three groups of college students were exposed to either Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos, K448, a relaxation tape, or silence. The group exposed to the Mozart piece was the only group to achieve an increase on the spatial IQ test. Further studies revealed that neither dance music nor taped short stories produced an increase in spatial IQ similar to the Mozart piece. The increase in spatial IQ appears to be related to some unique aspects of the Mozart piece rather than music in general.
  • Music may not only be related to intelligence by its stimulation of the brain, but it may also increase intelligence by the type of attitudes, interests, and discipline it fosters in children.
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    Studies indicate that early exposure to musical training helps a child's brain reach its potential by generating neural connections utilized in abstract reasoning.
Tero Toivanen

The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages: Scientific American - 0 views

  • The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts—their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues.
  • The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again.
  • “The most important implication of the study is that even when a per­son is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language,” Van Assche notes. “Becoming a bilingual changes one of people’s most automatic skills.”
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    "The most important implication of the study is that even when a per son is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language," Van Assche notes. "Becoming a bilingual changes one of people's most automatic skills."
Tero Toivanen

How the Brain Forms Categories | Neuroscience News - 0 views

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    "...amazing skill of our brain to turn a wealth of sensory information into a number of defined categories and objects"
Tero Toivanen

Movement Therapy May Also Improve Language Skills in Stroke Patients - 0 views

  • All of the patients exhibited improved motor and language abilities, although the six-week therapy only targeted arm movement. Interesting, Page says, patients exhibiting the greatest improvement on the arm tests also showed the most improvement on the language assessment.
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    All of the patients exhibited improved motor and language abilities, although the six-week therapy only targeted arm movement. Interesting, Page says, patients exhibiting the greatest improvement on the arm tests also showed the most improvement on the language assessment.
Tero Toivanen

Brain imaging predicts future reading progress in children with dyslexia - 0 views

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    Brain scans of adolescents with dyslexia can be used to predict the future improvement of their reading skills with an accuracy rate of up to 90 percent, new research indicates. Advanced analyses of the brain activity images are significantly more accurate in driving predictions than standardized reading tests or any other measures of children's behavior.
Tero Toivanen

Visual training to retain driving competence - and your independence! | On the Brain by... - 1 views

  • Today, Posit Science announced the release of a new computer-based visual training tool, DriveSharp, specifically designed to improve the performance abilities of adult automobile drivers to a degree that can be expected to very substantially impact their driving safety.
  • Again, with a few hours of intensive training, a youthful MOT performance level can be achieved for most individuals. The result: A still FURTHER increase of driving safety.
  • In our fast-moving world, losing control of one’s peripheral vision is a main cause of driving accidents.
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  • Ball and Roenker demonstrated that these losses are substantially reversible, through appropriate, intensive training, in almost all older drivers. UFOVs can be re-expanded to relatively youthful ability levels through only a few hours of exercise. The result: About 50% fewer driving accidents in the over-65 population.
  • Moreover, once your UFOV is opened up again, you use it!
  • You can use DriveSharp repeatedly, over the rest of your days, to keep yourself in fine driving fettle!
  • The second training program that is included in DriveSharp is designed to improve your ability to keep track of more than one thing happening at the same time. This fundamental visual skill — called “multiple object tracking” (MOT) — also dramatically declines as you get older.
  • As you get older, you progressively lose the ability to accurately detect and respond to visual events in your far visual periphery.
  • If you’ve reached your 50th birthday, DriveSharp training is especially important for upgrading and sustaining your driving competence. It’s all about maintaining your performance abilities in driving as in all other ways at the highest possible level, throughout the second half of life.
  • few other benefits demonstrated by published studies originating with the Ball/Roenker team (including University of South Florida scientist Sherri Willis and a University of Iowa scientist, Fred Wolinsky).
  • 1) You’re healthier after DriveSharp training! Five years after training, Physical indices of Quality of Life are more than 30% higher — maybe because you get out more.
  • Trainees are much more likely to have retained your driver’s license — and to have sustained their personal independence.
  • After DriveSharp, you are a more confident driver, as expressed by gains in the number of times you drive each week, by an increase in average driving distances, and by your driving more often at night, or in the rain or snow.
  • Try DriveSharp now: If you are a member of one of the participating AAA clubs, please visit your AAA club’s website for more information and a special offer on DriveSharp. If not, please visit www.DriveSharp.com or call (866)599-6463 to learn more.
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    Today, Posit Science announced the release of a new computer-based visual training tool, DriveSharp, specifically designed to improve the performance abilities of adult automobile drivers to a degree that can be expected to very substantially impact their driving safety.
Tero Toivanen

» Brain Plasticity: How learning changes your brain   « Brain Fitness Revolut... - 0 views

  • A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity associated with a given function can move to a different location as a consequence of normal experience, brain damage or recovery.
  • The brain compensates for damage by reorganizing and forming new connections between intact neurons. In order to reconnect, the neurons need to be stimulated through activity.
  • Research has shown that in fact the brain never stops changing through learning. Plasticity IS the capacity of the brain to change with learning. Changes associated with learning occur mostly at the level of the connections between neurons. New connections can form and the internal structure of the existing synapses can change.
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  • It looks like learning a second language is possible through functional changes in the brain: the left inferior parietal cortex is larger in bilingual brains than in monolingual brains.
  • For instance, London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus (in the posterior region) than London bus drivers (Maguire, Woollett, & Spiers, 2006)…. Why is that? It is because this region of the hippocampus is specialized in acquiring and using complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently. Taxi drivers have to navigate around London whereas bus drivers follow a limited set of routes.
  • Did you know that when you become an expert in a specific domain, the areas in your brain that deal with this type of skill will grow?
  • Plastic changes also occur in musicians brains compared to non-musicians.
  • They found that gray matter (cortex) volume was highest in professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians in several brain areas involved in playing music: motor regions, anterior superior parietal areas and inferior temporal areas.
  • Medical students’ brains showed learning-induced changes in regions of the parietal cortex as well as in the posterior hippocampus. These regions of the brains are known to be involved in memory retrieval and learning.
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    A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity associated with a given function can move to a different location as a consequence of normal experience, brain damage or recovery.
Tero Toivanen

First Evidence That Musical Training Affects Brain Development In Young Children - 0 views

  • The findings, published today (20 September 2006) in the online edition of the journal Brain [1], show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way to those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.
  • Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.
  • While previous studies have shown that older children given music lessons had greater improvements in IQ scores than children given drama lessons, this is the first study to identify these effects in brain-based measurements in young children.
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  • The researchers chose children being trained by the Suzuki method for several reasons: it ensured the children were all trained in the same way, were not selected for training according to their initial musical talent and had similar support from their families. In addition, because there was no early training in reading music, the Suzuki method provided the researchers with a good model of how training in auditory, sensory and motor activities induces changes in the cortex of the brain.
  • Analysis of the MEG responses showed that across all children, larger responses were seen to the violin tones than to the white noise, indicating that more cortical resources were put to processing meaningful sounds. In addition, the time that it took for the brain to respond to the sounds (the latency of certain MEG components) decreased over the year. This means that as children matured, the electrical conduction between neurons in their brains worked faster.
  • Of most interest, the Suzuki children showed a greater change over the year in response to violin tones in an MEG component (N250m) related to attention and sound discrimination than did the children not taking music lessons.
  • Analysis of the music tasks showed greater improvement over the year in melody, harmony and rhythm processing in the children studying music compared to those not studying music. General memory capacity also improved more in the children studying music than in those not studying music.
  • The finding of very rapid maturation of the N250m component to violin sounds in children taking music lessons fits with their large improvement on the memory test. It suggests that musical training is having an effect on how the brain gets wired for general cognitive functioning related to memory and attention.
  • It is clear that music is good for children's cognitive development and that music should be part of the pre-school and primary school curriculum.
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    Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.
Tero Toivanen

Low Pessimism Protects Against Stroke: The Health and Social Support (HeSSup) Prospecti... - 2 views

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    It's good for your life and health to be optimist.
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    It' s a slightly different perspective that I' m enjoying at this time but I appreciate it may only be true for some-I' ve just begun to understand what "faith" means tho I' m not religious-still! (I feel some empathy now as to why people are) I feel much more inclined to just sit still and connect inside with the Source of me-any meditation or spiritual practice can lead me there or creativity,music too,nature! But to deliberately connect to the part of us all that is connected and knows/is All. From that place I' ve understood that theres noone to be, nowhere to go, nothing to do as we are all there already as we are all IT! So of course daily I forget this but this insight has gifted me much more optimism as I can assume that whatever I really ask for/intend/desire is already in the big melting pot that we can Life/God. That is ' faith' Ive realised now- to ask and know intimately that it' s already a given and to STOP Worrying and completely ignore the naysayers etc. It' s really trusting that I' m connected to it all and I am not separate. I' m beginning to observe quite distinctly the thoughts that separate me from what I want/intend. Particularly in relation to my fellow beings! But then I turn to the place that is connected and I feel so good! and just thinking of the situation from that place and holding that good feeling in relation and giving it over (the problem) really helps! I know several spiritual teachers have said "give it over to me". I' m starting to understand it really is that simple. Trying hard and worrying just create such muck and mire! This may be part of the surrender letting go and letting God that others speak of also? I reckon it would be interesting to see where how people get there faith/trust in life that creates the underlying optimism. What gives that to them? I remember as a child I had it naturally I often got what I asked for and intended and there was an abundance of flow and optimism. No resistance. Fear and doubt come later
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