example essay
Playing a Musical Instrument
Aranxa Pena
October 14, 2013
Most people have heard sometime about the benefits of listening to music. We’ve heard about how listening to music can affect our mood: listening to happy music can make us happy and sad music can make us sad. We know that listening to classical music or quiet music can help us when we’re studying for a test or relax us (sometimes even to the point where we fall asleep). But what most of us don’t know about is that playing musical instruments can help us develop our brains and improve certain abilities. Some researchers say that playing a musical instrument increases IQ ( Intelligence Quotient) by seven points."We found that even in people over the age of 65 after four or five months of playing an instrument for an hour a week there were strong changes in the brain. The parts of the brain that control hearing, memory, and the part that controls the hands among others, all become more active and the architecture of the brain changes. For children especially, we found that learning to play the piano, for instance teaches, them to be more self-disciplined, more attentive and better at planning.”Says Lutz Jäncke, a psychologist of the University of Zurich. In his article called “Music drives brain plasticity”, published in 2009 Jäncke states how music has become an issue in the field of the cognitive neurosciences, due to the discovery that playing a musical instrument can affect the structure and functionality of the brain. “A general finding of the studies published thus far is that nearly all of those brain areas involved in the control of musical expertise (motor cortex, auditory cortex, cerebellum, and other areas) show specific anatomical and functional features in professional and semi-professional musicians.”
One of the most visible benefits of playing a musical instrument is the improvement of memory capacity and ability. For example, the
Aranxa Pena
October 14, 2013
Most people have heard sometime about the benefits of listening to music. We’ve heard about how listening to music can affect our mood: listening to happy music can make us happy and sad music can make us sad. We know that listening to classical music or quiet music can help us when we’re studying for a test or relax us (sometimes even to the point where we fall asleep). But what most of us don’t know about is that playing musical instruments can help us develop our brains and improve certain abilities. Some researchers say that playing a musical instrument increases IQ ( Intelligence Quotient) by seven points."We found that even in people over the age of 65 after four or five months of playing an instrument for an hour a week there were strong changes in the brain. The parts of the brain that control hearing, memory, and the part that controls the hands among others, all become more active and the architecture of the brain changes. For children especially, we found that learning to play the piano, for instance teaches, them to be more self-disciplined, more attentive and better at planning.”Says Lutz Jäncke, a psychologist of the University of Zurich. In his article called “Music drives brain plasticity”, published in 2009 Jäncke states how music has become an issue in the field of the cognitive neurosciences, due to the discovery that playing a musical instrument can affect the structure and functionality of the brain. “A general finding of the studies published thus far is that nearly all of those brain areas involved in the control of musical expertise (motor cortex, auditory cortex, cerebellum, and other areas) show specific anatomical and functional features in professional and semi-professional musicians.”
One of the most visible benefits of playing a musical instrument is the improvement of memory capacity and ability. For example, the