SCANS of children’s brains before and after musical training show that the brain changes associated with musical ability only come with hard work.
The brains of adult musicians have previously been shown to have a different structure from those of non-musicians, but it was unclear whether this was innate or something that had developed through practice. The new results back the idea that practice is crucial.
“This is the first paper showing differential brain development in children who learned and played a musical instrument versus those that did not,” says Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard Medical School in Boston,…
