learns. Our challenge with special needs students is to teach the way individual brains learn, tailoring programs for different learning styles and needs. Music making is a natural integrator of neurodevelopmental systems yet a teacher who does not understand how the brain learns can block the process.
Bridging the Hemispheres
Many years of intensive deliberate practice actually change the body and the brain.
Geoff Colvin
Neurons are the information carriers of the brain. Daniel Levitin explains that the average brain has one hundred billion neurons, each neuron connecting to another one in limitless combinations. The potential of the brain comes from these interconnections. In This Is Your Brain on Music, Levitin describes the brain as a parallel processing machine, not a serial processor. When we are making music, every region in our working brain is affected as some point in the process, often at the same moment.
In Arts with the Brain in Mind, Eric Jensen states that music making may be a fast track to engaging and enhancing higher brain activities. He explains:
Music helps you think by activating and synchronizing neural firing patterns that orchestrate and connect multiple brain sites. The neural synchrony ensembles increase both the brain’s efficiency and effectiveness. These key systems are well connected and located in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes, as well as the cerebellum.1
The corpus callosum, the bridge connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, has been discovered to be thicker in musicians than non-musicians, most notably enlarged in musicians who began training as young children. The corpus callosum completes its development by age 11. The cerebellum, the region of the brain involved in rhythm and coordination, has also been found to be larger in musicians.
More recent research, due to new brain scan imaging, reveals that white matter in the brain is more developed in musicians, specifically pianists, than non-musicians. White matter, as in the corpus callosum, consists of the cables which connect the neurons, the gray matter of the brain. These cables are coated in myelin, which continues to develop into adulthood. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to make new connections and reorganize itself as it receives sensory input or adapts to changes in the body. This occurs at an explosive rate in childhood and slows as we age.
Learning a complex skill requiring hours of repeated practice, such as playing an instrument or practicing a sport, changes the white matter in the brain. It establishes neural pathways, laying down tracks. Myelin creates neural freeways, developing muscle memory. Children’s brains are still myelinating which is why it is much easier for them to learn to play an instrument, develop an athletic ability, become fluent in a foreign language, or achieve expertise in many pursuits. Adults can and should certainly learn new skills but the optimum window of opportunity has passed. These abilities will never be as natural for them as they are for adults who learned these skills as young children. Professional concertizing musicians and world class athletes were not first exposed to those skills as young adults. Frank Wilson calls musicians “small muscle athletes” and views learning to play an instrument as the ultimate integration of our neurological and motor systems. You may already be familiar with the well-known“10 Years or 10,000 Hours Rule.” Practicing a skill with intense focus for ten years or 10,000 hours appears to be the formula for honing an expert skill. The experience of daily focused practice is more important than natural ability or intelligence.
Concentrated Practice
Daniel Coyle, in The Talent Code, supports the belief that talent is a myth. Repetition and engaging in deep practice daily are the keys to developing our abilities. Geoff Colvin, in Talent Is Overrated, describes this process as deliberate practice, applicable to musical, artistic, athletic, and business expertise.
Through years of practice, musicians understand that mindless practice, simply going through the motions, does not achieve the same results as concentrated practice, consciously working to correct and improve challenging sections of music. We make the most progress when we isolate the most difficult sections of a piece and focus first on mastering them. I believe that it is almost better for a student not to practice at all than to mindlessly practice, cementing mistakes and bad habits.
We learn through correcting mistakes. Repeated neuron firings grow our myelin. Coyle explains:
Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it’s vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability. Deep practice raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself.2
Daniel Coyle offers this excellent summation of effective education in The Talent Code3:
1) Circuits are fired and honed.
2) Mistakes are made and corrected.
3) Myelin flourishes.
4) Talent blooms.
As teachers of students with special needs, this is critical information for us to understand: White matter abnormalities, a breakdown in neuron connections, has been found in people with schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, language disorders, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Cross-brain communication is affected. I predict that this realization will impact researching the musical brain in the next decade. If music making is the ideal neural networking experience, which thickens white matter in the brain, grows myelin, and improves connections between brain sites, then music making and learning to play an instrument could play a significant role in helping children who struggle with these disorders, since their brains are yet developing.
In thirty years of experience, I have observed that students with special needs who are passionate about making music and committed to daily concentrated practice will blossom as musicians and pianists. I have observed that often “normal” or even gifted students who are not passionate or committed to daily practice do not make consistent progress. When working with special learners, we must remember that passion and practice are better predictors of musical success than intelligence or natural ability. Because music making is easy for some students does not always translate into working hard to make progress. Sometimes it proves an obstacle. One advantage for special learners is that they have learned how to work hard to overcome their limitations in reaching a goal.
Music therapy and special music education have also been effective in treating patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. While music making can help patients improve and slow the impact of disease, it cannot reorganize the brain as it possibly may in children. Yet adults continue to develop myelin until around age 50. It begins to break down as we age but can be rebuilt with regular practice. Whether we are young or old, music making benefits our brains.
Music and Chemical Changes
The brain releases neurotransmitters, chemicals which connect neurons and affect our behavior. Dopamine is a mood regulator and affects our coordination. It gives us a keen sensation of pleasure. When addicts indulge in their drugs of choice, dopamine is released into their systems. Serotonin is produced in the brain stem and also regulates mood. Endorphins, which elevate mood and reduce pain, are released by the thalamus in the limbic lobe. Studies have shown that music making causes dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins to be released by the brain. I have heard more than one teenager say, “I don’t need to do drugs. I have my music.” Whether young people are experiencing music through making it, listening to it, or
