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Perhaps the most important finding in Bunge’s data is that the training helped the neediest kids the most. The farther down a child started on the rankings, the quicker and greater was his cognitive improvement. This is extremely rare in education interventions. Usually, smart kids benefit most, and the kids who struggle at the beginning only fall farther behind.

Harvard University researcher Gottfried Schlaug has also studied the cognitive effects of musical training. Schlaug and his colleagues found a correlation between early-childhood training in music and enhanced motor and auditory skills as well as improvements in verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning.

"[The findings] suggest that a music intervention that strengthens the basic auditory music perception skills of children with dyslexia may also remediate some of their language deficits."

Shahin said that when a person listens to sounds over and over, especially for something as harmonic or meaningful as music and speech, the appropriate neurons get reinforced in responding preferentially to those sounds compared to other sounds.