Lately, the fact – to put generally – that music will make you smarter, is becoming more widespread and common knowledge. But as with any issue, you’ll usually find two camps on either side.
Generally speaking you’ll be hard pressed to find a lot of people hating on music, but back in December 2013 the media went crazy plastering the internet with articles like
“Muting the Mozart effect”
“Music makes you smarter. Right? Actually, it doesn’t.”
“Do, Re, Mi, Fa-get the Piano Lessons: Music May Not Make You Smarter” (Seriously?…)
They wrote blanket statements to capture eyeballs by throwing the Harvard name around. The articles centered around ideas like “Contrary to popular belief, a study—led by a Harvard graduate student who plays the saxophone, flute, bassoon, oboe, and clarinet—found no cognitive benefits to music lessons.”
Let’s face it, they were trying to establish credibility by showing how the researcher himself was a musician and that the information was based off a Harvard research project. (If it’s from Harvard, it must be right! Right?)
If anyone took the next step and actually viewed the study results, they’d easily realize those journalists were completely misleading and throwing around catchy titles with no merit behind them. They were just trying to get more reads.
Headlines were so misleading the Harvard- musician researcher, Samuel Mehr, actually had to release statements explaining how the journalists were making critical errors by claiming his study proves music doesn’t make you smarter.
Unfortunately the average person browsing news online wouldn’t readily stumble across what Mehr had to say, but lucky for us, I did.
We did not debunk anything. We did not magically prove the null hypothesis. We studied one type of music training for a short period of time in one age group and found no evidence for an effect. We critically reviewed the experimental literature and found little evidence to support “music makes you smarter.”
This does not mean that there are no cognitive benefits of music education, it just means that we didn’t find any using the training and methods that we did…
This also does not mean that there is no value to music education. That is a moralistic claim. We are making a scientific claim — and a far less sweeping one than is being widely reported in the press.
Mehr understands that the real and accurate results of his study would not provide the press what they needed Speaking towards the actual findings he said:
“Of course, this is not a headline that will sell many papers!” (Look back to those idiotic and misleading titles above! – He was right.)
At the end, Mehr advised what any smart person would – look into the matter for yourself and don’t just accept whatever you read as fact or truth.
If you’re interested in this topic, please read the actual science and not just the press coverage. One of the reasons we published this in an open-access journal is that everyone can read the real thing: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0082007
I read it, of course. Here are statements pulled from the actual report:
- “One concern is that we might have observed cognitive benefits of music classes had the classes had continued for a longer time. While the total classroom time in each of our experiments was less than those of previous randomized trials,”
- “ A second concern is that we might have observed transfer effects had our music curriculum involved more intense music instruction” – “used classroom-based group music instruction in lieu of instrumental music lessons.”
- “We acknowledge, however, that our training intensity differs from previous work employing more formal music instruction. It is possible that intense training of the type traditionally reserved for older children might elicit cognitive benefits in preschool children”
The bottom line is the study was too short to really prove or disprove anything.
What’s very interesting to note is the researches themselves suggested that had they used more intense instruction, they may have had different results. When you review all the other research out there, you’d agree with that summation.
Out of all the supporting claims from available studies, the thing in common is instrumental training. Formally learning to play instrument is what provides the cognitive “music makes you smarter” results.
Make sure you do your own research, always!
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1so1xs/two_new_studies_by_harvard_researchers_show_no/ce00vty
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1sqczt/im_samuel_mehr_the_first_author_on_the_harvard/