Kids And Parents

How processing of getting of musical information correlates develop during childhood? We know that if bigger brain parts mean a bigger intellect, musicians may have a leg up on others. Brain imaging research shows that several brain areas are larger in adult musicians than in nonmusicians. For example, the primary motor cortex and the cerebellum, which are involved in movement and coordination, are bigger in adult musicians than in people who don’t play musical instruments. The area that connects the two sides of the brain, the corpus callosum, is also larger in adult musicians.

Last researches have shown that already 5-year-old children process music is according to a well-established cognitive representation of the major–minor tonal system and according to music-syntactic regularities. Moreover, in contrast to adults, an early negative brain response was left predominant in boys, whereas it was bilateral in girls, indicating a gender difference in children processing music, and revealing that children process music with a hemispheric weighting different from that of adults. Because children process, in contrast to adults, music in the same hemispheres as they process language, results indicate that children process music and language more similarly than adults. This finding might support the notion of a common origin of music and language in the human brain, and concurs with findings that demonstrate the importance of musical features of speech for the acquisition of language.
(As illustration I’ve used the wonderful picture of Jim Gordon.)