Dr PAUL JESSEN
Grow Your Brain!
How can you improve your brain function? We live in a world where mental abilities are essential to most jobs. Higher education, all the way to post doctoral research has now become the norm! How will you prepare yourself or your child for this future of high academic performance? The answer is STUDY MUSIC, more specifically, learn to play the piano, or organ!
Why? How?
Of course, you now wonder “why?!”
What is the basis of my assertion?
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Studying the piano has these brain benefits:
We have four modalities of learning:
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Visual
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Auditory (hearing)
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Kinaesthetic (physical movements)
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Analytical
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Learning to play the piano uses all of these modalities simultaneously, which no other discipline does. You must
Read the music, using the visual cortex
Listen to what you play to make sure that you are playing the correct notes (auditory cortex)
Feel your fingers on the keyboard (kinaesthetic)
Connect both sides of the brain to operate the two hands in sync with each other, but playing different notes.
Constantly analyse what you are reading, seeing, hearing, and feeling (hippocampus).
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Brain Integration
No other learning experience forces the entire brain to coordinate together, much less force the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves connecting the two brain hemispheres) to grow more complex in order to connect the two hemispheres of the brain to not only connect functional areas on each side of the brain together, but also to control the two hands, which are controlled by opposite sides of the brain.
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Finger Control
AND
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Protection against Dememtia
Yet another benefit in our computer/phone keyboard based living is the training of all the fingers of both hands and growing extra muscles to give independent finger control for all the fingers. This also involves expanding the neural network in the brain.
Yet another added benefit is that this increased brain complexity reduces the effects of dementia. With the same amount of brain damage due to the disease, a musician can function better than a non-musician. I have seen this in my seniors’ choirs, where one woman was becoming increasingly incoherent (at age 90), however once we began to sing a complex piece that she had sung all her life, her cognitive function returned and stayed strong until her 102nd year!