Music classes in childhood may lead to changes in the brain_美文

Music classes in childhood may lead to changes in the brain

This is Science in the News, in VOA Special English. I’m Christopher Cruise.

Today we tell about experiments at a major university in the central United States. Northwestern University researchers are studying how music affects the human brain. Jim Tedder has the story.

It doesn’t matter whether you play a guitar, a piano, a horn, or a drum. And what kind of music you play is not important. Maybe you like to play classical music like this.

Or maybe you like to play this kind of music.

Or this…

Or even this…

Just play it! It will do good things for your body because…

“We’ve known for some time that playing a musical instrument can change the anatomy as well as the function…the way the brain works.”

Nina Kraus is a professor at Northwestern University near Chicago, Illinois. She is also the head of the Auditory-Neuroscience Laboratory, where she investigates how music affects the human body.

Recently, she did tests in her lab using forty-five volunteers. Some of them had taken music classes and played an instrument, and others had not.

“People will play and study a musical instrument for some time in their lives and then that’s it! And we wanted to know did this early experience have a lasting effect on the way the nervous system responded to sound.”

Professor Kraus began by gently placing electrodes onto the heads of the volunteers. The wires from these electrical devices were then connected to a computer.