Music lessons are sometimes sold as a sort of cognitive training. Put a child in front of a piano, the story goes, and ...

Observing a pianist at a recital—converting musical notations into precisely timed finger movements on a piano—can be a powerful emotional experience. As a researcher of neuroscience and a pianist ...

The percentage of students receiving music education has been in decline for decades. The Harmony Project, a music program for inner city kids in Los Angeles partners with a neurobiologist to study ...

An MIT study done in Beijing shows music may help with spoken language. While many people often consider music a universal language, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study done in ...

In a previous Psychology Today blog post, "Musical Training Optimizes Brain Function," I wrote about a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience which reported that playing an instrument before ...

Cognitive decline represents a major barrier to healthy aging. A key challenge for successful aging is to discover interventions that prevent age-related cognitive decline. Musical training has the ...

Perhaps you should have been more excited to take those piano lessons as a child. Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital conducted a controlled study using functional MRI brain imaging and found a ...

What is the relationship between music and speech processing? Playing an instrument may help children better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret language nuances conveyed ...

Learning to play an instrument in youth helps older people retain listening skills, according to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. In an experiment at the Rotman Research Institute ...

Parents have long treated piano recitals and violin lessons as a kind of academic insurance policy, a cultural bet that practicing scales today will mean higher test scores tomorrow. Psychologists are ...

Music perception and training constitute a multidisciplinary field that explores the intricate interplay between acoustic signals, neural processing and experiential learning. At its core, the study ...