“Neuroscience research is revealing the impressive impact of arts instruction on students' cognitive, social and emotional development.” by David A. Sousa
Every culture on this planet has art forms. Neuro-scientists continue to find clues as to how the mental and physical activities required for the arts are so fundamental to brain function.
-Certain brain areas respond only to music while others are devoted to initiating and coordinating movement from intense running to the delicate sway of the arms.
-Drama provokes specialized networks that focus on spoken language and stimulate emotions.
-Visual arts excite the internal visual processing system to recall reality or create fantasy with the same ease.
These talents are the result of many centuries of interaction between humans and their environment. This can be shown through certain ways we learned how to survive. In cultures without reading and writing, the arts are the media through that culture's history, mores and values are transmitted to the younger generations. They also transmit more basic information necessary for the culture's survival, such as how and what to hunt for food and how to defend the village from predators.
In modern cultures, the arts are rarely thought of as survival skills, but rather as frills — the esthetic product of a wealthy society with lots of time to spare. People pay high ticket prices to see the arts performed professionally, leading to the belief that the arts are highly valued.
Yet seldom do public elementary schools enjoy this continuous support. When school budgets get tight, elementary-level art and music programs are among the first to be reduced or eliminated. Now, pressure from the No Child Left Behind Act to improve reading and mathematics achievement is prompting elementary schools to trade off instruction in the arts for more classroom preparation for the mandatory high-stakes tests. Ironically, this is happening just when neuroscience research is revealing the impressive impact that the arts have on the young brain's cognitive, social and emotional development.
-Certain brain areas respond only to music while others are devoted to initiating and coordinating movement from intense running to the delicate sway of the arms.
-Drama provokes specialized networks that focus on spoken language and stimulate emotions.
-Visual arts excite the internal visual processing system to recall reality or create fantasy with the same ease.
These talents are the result of many centuries of interaction between humans and their environment. This can be shown through certain ways we learned how to survive. In cultures without reading and writing, the arts are the media through that culture's history, mores and values are transmitted to the younger generations. They also transmit more basic information necessary for the culture's survival, such as how and what to hunt for food and how to defend the village from predators.
In modern cultures, the arts are rarely thought of as survival skills, but rather as frills — the esthetic product of a wealthy society with lots of time to spare. People pay high ticket prices to see the arts performed professionally, leading to the belief that the arts are highly valued.
Yet seldom do public elementary schools enjoy this continuous support. When school budgets get tight, elementary-level art and music programs are among the first to be reduced or eliminated. Now, pressure from the No Child Left Behind Act to improve reading and mathematics achievement is prompting elementary schools to trade off instruction in the arts for more classroom preparation for the mandatory high-stakes tests. Ironically, this is happening just when neuroscience research is revealing the impressive impact that the arts have on the young brain's cognitive, social and emotional development.
Cognitive Growth
- During the brain's early years, neural connections are being made at a rapid rate.
- Activities engage all the senses and wire the brain for successful learning.
- When children enter school, these art activities need to be continued and enhanced.
- Brain areas are developed as the child learns songs and rhymes and creates drawings and finger paintings.
- The dancing and movements during play develop gross motor skills, also emotional well - being
- Sharing their artwork enhances social skills.
- They develop essential thinking tools — pattern recognition and development; mental representations of what is observed or imagined; symbolic, allegorical and metaphorical representations; careful observation of the world; and abstraction from complexity.
- The arts also contribute to the education of young children by helping them realize the breadth of human experience, see the different ways humans express sentiments and convey meaning, and develop subtle and complex forms of thinking.
- Although the arts are often thought of as separate subjects, like chemistry or algebra, they really are a collection of skills and thought processes that transcend all areas of human engagement.
Music Listening
- Many researchers believe the ability to perceive and enjoy music is an inborn human trait.
- This biological aspect is supported by the discovery that the brain has specialized areas that respond only to music and that these areas provoke emotional responses.
- Brain scans show the neural areas stimulated depend on the type of music — melodic tunes stimulate areas that evoke pleasant feelings while dissonant sounds activate other areas that produce unpleasant emotions.
- Research studies show that before infants reach their first birthday, they are able to use music as a retrieval cue, differentiate between two adjacent musical tones, recognize a melody when it is played in a different key and categorize rhythmic and melodic patterns on the basis of underlying tempo.
- Research on the effects of music on the brain and body are divided into the effects of listening to music and the effects of creating or producing music on an instrument.
- The notion that music affects cognitive performance catapulted from the research laboratory to the television talk shows in 1993 when a study found that spatial-temporal reasoning — the ability to form mental images from physical objects or to see patterns in time and space — improved in college students after listening to a Mozart sonata for 10 minutes.
- The results of this study, promptly dubbed "The Mozart Effect," were widely publicized and misinterpreted to imply that listening to a Mozart sonata would enhance intelligence by raising IQ.
- Subsequent studies have confirmed that listening to Mozart does enhance various types of spatial and temporal reasoning tasks, especially problems requiring a sequence of mental images to correctly reassemble objects.
Better Numeracy
- Of all academic subjects, mathematics is most closely connected to music.
- Counting is fundamental to music because one must count beats, count rests and count how long to hold notes.
- Music students use geometry to remember the correct finger positions for notes or chords on instruments.
- Reading music requires an understanding of ratios and proportions so that whole notes are held longer than half notes.
- Music and mathematics also are related through sequences called intervals: A mathematical interval is the difference between two numbers and a musical interval is the ratio of their frequencies.
- And arithmetic progressions in music correspond to geometric progressions in mathematics.
- Several imaging studies have shown that musical training activated the same areas of the brain that were also activated during mathematical proc-essing.
- It appears that early musical training begins to build the same neural networks that later will be used to complete numerical and mathematical tasks.