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This article is pretty interesting. I have heard about a lot of different studies that have been going on about how music can help you learn better. I think this is really cool because I completely agree. Music can make any learning situation more interesting and engaging. When you study and tie thoughs notes to music it can help you on the test. If you are singing that same song that you listened to when you were studying to when you are taking the test. It can trigger when you learned so you can do better on the test. I am a strong believer that music can help you learn better. 

This is a really fascinating study - it took me a while to work out and explain exactly what was going on - but bear with me - 'cos the results are super interesting.   This is from the Neuroaesthetics of Music Group up inHelsinkiFinland.  73 subjects and using an FMRI to look at what's happening in the brain!

Three things you need to hold in your head:

Thing 1:

This is a basic learning test - where the subjects are presented with a pair of symbols and they are trained to select and remember the correct one.  They get three rounds of training and feedback is given with either a smiley or a frowny face.  After training, they are given a test and are scored on how many they get right.

Thing 2:

Before the testing, the subjects are given 14 pieces of music which they self select into 3 pieces of "neutral" music and 3 pieces of "pleasurable" music.  They also answer a series of questions about their personal musical experiences.

Thing 3:

This is the fun bit - while the subjects are doing the learning and the testing - they are being played either neutral music or pleasurable music (self identified remember?)  This enables the researchers to test the effect of different music types on learning behavior and to match it against musical experience - genius!

OK - so you've got those three things in your head - now let's look at the results.

Results

Seems that if you're someone with a lot of musical experience - you learn better when listening to neutral music - but you test better when listening to pleasurable music.

If you're less musical - you learn better with pleasurable music, but you test better with neutral music - the complete opposite.

That's pretty interesting!  The researchers propose that this is due to different listening strategies between the two groups which would make sense - but what does that mean.

I reckon that as a musician I'm naturally more attuned to devote mental resource to music than a non-musician and I'm likely to devote even more resource to music that I like.  So - when I'm learning something - when I'm forming neural pathways and connections - I want as much resource made available to me as possible - so - neutral music is better.  However - when I'm testing - which is more about recall and memory than it is about building - then I want to feel good - I want to juice my system - so - even though I might lose some resource by listening to music I like - I feel significantly better - which impacts and improves my test performance.

As a non-musician - the difference between resource allocated to neutral or pleasurable music is probably a lot less, so when it comes to learning - the "feel good" factor of pleasurable music seems to outweigh the  resource cost.  However - when it comes to testing - it might be that the resource cost of pleasurable music may become distracting and outweighs the feel good factor.

Who knows?

I think this kind of research and study is amazing and could lead to massive changes in how we learn and perform and the role of music within that process.  You go Helsinki!

Healthy sample size of 165 preschoolers although the exact nature of the study seems to be a bit opaque.  In essence - kids who worked with teachers who had intensive music training had significantly better literacy rats than the control group.  Quite what these teachers did is the unclear part but the researchers are using it as a data point in the argument to include more music in early education.