Music Boosts Memory

Published: 01 August 2003
Neuropsychology Journal

Psychologists have found children who learn to play a musical instrument could be improving their memory and academic performance. Learning musical scales and reading music can develop the left side of youngsters' brains, which controls the ability to learn vocabularies and retain information, scientists claim. Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong tested 90 boys between the ages of six and 15. Half of them belonged to a school orchestra and had received extra musical training, whereas the other half had not been taught how to play an instrument.

The study compared the students' verbal memory skills by asking them to recall words from a list. Researchers found that the musically-trained boys remembered significantly more new words than the untrained group. They also found that performance seemed to rise in proportion to the length of musical training. Musical instruction had no effect on visual memory, however. Study leader Dr Agnes Chan suggested that the improved verbal memory stems from musical training because both tasks engage the same section of the brain. 

The findings, published  in the journal Neuropsychology, also suggest that the effects are long lasting. Researchers found that, a year later, children in the orchestra who had stopped their musical training retained the verbal memory advantage gained from the instruction. Dr. Chan concluded: "Students with better verbal memory probably will find it easier to learn in school."