Eclectic Technology

A new study indicates that musical instruction for just a few years during childhood can have long-lasting benefits...

This post looks at a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience that finds that "just one to five years of experience playing music as a child was associated with an improved cognitive ability in processing complex sounds as a young adult." 

This study supports the need for public education to provide music education, "[Along with] earlier research, we infer that a few years of music lessons also confer advantages in how one perceives and attends to sounds in everyday communication situations, such as noisy restaurants." For more information click through to the article.

...Cognitive scientists determined that people’s short-term memory is very limited – it can only process so much at once. A lot of the information presented in a typical lecture comes at students too fast and is quickly forgotten...So for reasons he can’t remember, Mazur told the students to discuss the question with each other.

“And something happened in my classroom which I had never seen before,” he says. “The entire classroom erupted in chaos. They were dying to explain it to one another and to talk about it.”