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Many studies have shown that music training directly engages multiple brain regions simultaneously thereby improving; brain plasticity, memory, IQ, abstract reasoning, mathematical skills, problem-solving, planning, attention to detail, fine motor skills, managing emotions, language skills and enhanced divergent thinking capabilities. But in the age of AI, music training used to ignite creativity will be the most essential benefit of all.   

 

Connecting Music With Creativity

There are five unique benefits students gain with music training that are specifically connected to skills that support creativity. They are in the form of six drivers of creativity:

1. A mind that easily and continuously asks questions. Playing on an instrument is one of the very few organized and regimented activities that can train the mind to be in a cognitive state of continuous 'question-flow'. This cognitive state enables the music student to play correctly and play along with everyone else. This same state is then what enables high-level creativity and innovation.

2. Engaged, expanded and focused emotion. While both emotion and intelligence are required for creativity, they are two completely separate components that work together. (More information on emotion detailed further ahead) But only the curriculum of the 'Arts' in education engages, expands and focuses a students emotion alongside their intelligence. Within that Arts, the strongest and most potent domain for that is music training.

3. Boosting engagement of brain networks that are responsible for decision-making, ability to focus attention and inhibit impulses. This is achieved because there is a change to both the structure of the brain’s white matter, which carries signals through the brain, and gray matter, which contains most of the brain’s neurons that are active in processing information.

4. Learning to combine sensory and auditory information with motor system capabilities. Musicians then use this new individual skill to further learn group behavioral adaptation, prediction and cooperation toward shared goals.

​5. Accelerating maturity in areas of the brain responsible for sound processing, language development, speech perception, reading skills and time management.

 

6. Playing an acoustic instrument engages more brain regions simultaneously than any other activity to ignite neuroplasticity, which is the forging of more neural pathways through which information can flow.  for supercharged creativity. This boosts rapid information processing and accelerates the connection of disparate ideas.  

These are critically important benefits for adolescent students whose brain wiring is heavily influenced by their cognitive and behavioral experiences. Neuropsychology shows that adolescents build associative connections between signals that are experienced simultaneously. The Neuropsychology principle underlying all this associative learning is: 'What fires together wires together.' Simply put, there is absolutely no other activity that students can engage in that comes even close to developing the robust cognitive structure that is attained through music training. Therefore, exposing students to learning how to play an acoustic instrument is critical to maximizing their inherent creative potential. ​
 

 

Connecting Music With Emotion

There are unlimited styles of music that acoustic instruments can produce. But the most impactful is symphonic music that our society benefits from on a regular basis. Consider how much our culture is impacted by Hollywood and the gaming industry, which extensively use symphonic music in their movies and games. Music programs are the starting point of producing the musicians and composers responsible for that music. More importantly it needs to be understood that symphonic music is being used in the first place because of its unique ability to induce and stimulate emotion within the viewer. Emotion then imbues images with feeling and the verbal dialogue with context. If you were to remove the symphonic music, the communication between the screen and the viewer would be severely impaired. The images and dialogue would come across as cold and lifeless because the viewer would lack the communication of an emotional experience.

Essentially, it’s the vibrations from acoustic instruments in symphonic music that are the catalysts which induce and stimulate emotion. The vibration-induced emotion is elastic and temporary. That’s why even a short segment of acoustic music can take the listener on a rollercoaster of radically different intense emotions that then leave the listener in a neutral state after the music ends. Depending on the characteristic of the vibrations, our minds can discern the type of emotion induced. The fast/high vibrations induce a wide spectrum of positive love-based emotion. The slow/low vibrations induce a wide spectrum of negative fear-based emotion.

The wide breadth of emotion connected to music goes beyond just being a main component of communication, it’s also the main component for creativity. That’s why successful creative people and innovators always have a lot of emotion, in the form of passion, for the work they do. That emotion is the catalyst which stimulates the intelligence of their minds to think with greater speed, force and divergence. In the same way, the induced emotion within a music student functions as the catalyst which stimulates the rewiring of the student’s brain during music training. In fact, this function of emotion is what maximizes the three unique benefits, outlined at the beginning, connected to skills that support creativity. As such, it turns out that music programs are a platform that achieve an incredible self-reinforcing loop outcome where:

When students engage in music training, it ignites their emotions, which in turn sparks a profound rewiring of the brain, fostering an enhanced capacity for creativity. This surge in creativity then cycles back, sharpening their cognitive abilities across all subjects, including music itself. That's precisely why no other activity rivals music training in unlocking and maximizing a student's innate creative potential.


Connecting Music To The Future Of Education

In this new era of AI, information and hard skills learned will continually become outdated and obsolete within short time frames. A consensus will begin to develop throughout society that the unique human potential and skill for creativity is the only advantage humans have over technology, no matter how advanced technology becomes. That means that humans will be relevant in the future only if they can bring something new and creative to their work and learning every single day. Within this future society there will be nearly unlimited potential for personal self-growth, which has been labeled by Psychology as a ‘growth mindset’. This creative growth mindset is what will define human professional and personal success in the future. Albert Einstein understood this almost 100 years ago when he noted: “A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”

As society transitions to this new era, Education will also be forced to start transitioning to experimenting with different variations of Project Based Learning curriculums. During this turbulent transition, the music programs will be the anchors that Education will lean on. It will be the music programs that continue to be essential in Education by fostering student’s abilities to think creatively, thereby sustaining their potential for success. ​Consequently, this is can be the vision statement for ‘why’ music programs in Education are not just important but essential for society:

Music programs are platforms that develop a student’s creative
potential for self-growth and ability to adapt to societal change.

In the near future it will be understood that students need music training as a required cognitive workout to be successful in business and any STEM field - just like it is currently understood that lifting weights is a required physical workout to be successful in sports and athletics. ​