The following exerpts are from an article on the National Library of Medicine website: How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward and other modulating variables. by Ewa A. Miendlarzewska and Wiebke J. Trost– The article in its entirety can be found HERE
“Learning to play an instrument offers a child the opportunity for creative self-expression and the development of an identity. Furthermore, musical training can be a leisure activity and a possibility to learn a form of discipline outside of the frame of the school curriculum, which gives the opportunity for rewarding experiences of self-achievement and positive reinforcement“
“Correlational and interventional studies of children undergoing music training consistently show that they perform better in the areas closely associated with music: fine motor skill, rhythm perception and auditory discrimination.”
“For children, music lessons act as additional schooling—requiring focused attention, memorization, and the progressive mastery of a technical skill. It is therefore likely that transfer skills of executive function, self-control and sustained focused attention translate into better results in other subjects, and eventually in higher scores of general IQ“
“This benefit of musical training can not only be found in tasks of auditory perception, but also in verbal abilities such as verbal fluency and memory, second language acquisition and reading abilities, demonstrating far transfer effects of musical training“
“Musical sounds and all other sounds share most of the processing stages throughout the auditory system and although speech is different from music production in several dimensions, musical training has been shown to transfer to language related skills“
“When comparing musically trained with untrained children, it is not surprising that differences in the performance of listening tasks and auditory processing are found.“
“Thus, although all arts and sports programs do have beneficial effects on cognitive development, instrumental musical training appears unique in the wide array of observed long-term effects, although there may be other factors mediating this effect “
“Learning to play an instrument offers a child the opportunity for creative self-expression and the development of an identity. Furthermore, musical training can be a leisure activity and a possibility to learn a form of discipline outside of the frame of the school curriculum, which gives the opportunity for rewarding experiences of self-achievement and positive reinforcement“
