| Published: | February 21, 2010 |
| Source: | News Chief |
| Category: | Research |
Music to our ears not only affects our mood and, if too loud, our hearing, but actually reaches into many different parts of our brains. Tunes - especially those we perform ourselves - have a big influence in how our brains organize to process and filter sound, researchers have been finding. Playing a musical instrument appears to both improve our ability to hear and our ability to focus and remember, according to two recent studies.
In one experiment, neurobiologists at Northwestern University in Chicago found that musicians have a perceptual advantage for being able to communicate in noisy environments. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Lab, said the 16 highly trained musicians tested were better than 15 non-musicians at picking out key elements of speech from background noise made up of babble from six different speakers. The study was published in November in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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