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Translator: Cissy Yun
Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
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What if,
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what if a large number
of scientific studies
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had found that there was one activity
that could improve our cognitive function,
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help our memory systems to work,
help us to learn language,
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help us to moderate our emotional states,
help us to solve complex problems
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and help our brains
to be healthier into later life?
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What if that activity,
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while beneficial if undertaken
at any time during our lives,
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was actually found by the scientists
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to be most beneficial if it was undertaken
before the age of seven?
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What if that activity,
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unlike the momentary pain
of a vaccination needle,
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is actually enjoyable
for everyone involved?
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Now, you might be expecting me
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to reveal a new superfood
we could eat some more of,
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maybe a pill we could take every day
or an exercise regimen we could start,
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But actually, this activity is as old
as our cultures and societies itself.
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And that activity is music education.
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Now, I may well be biased.
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I am a music educator,
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and I understand the world
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through the twin lenses
of being a musician and being a teacher.
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But even before I became a teacher,
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I used to look around at all the people
I was doing musical activities with
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and I used to wonder why
they seemed to be good at everything,
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why they seem to do well
at all of their studies,
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why they fit more into a day.
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And while many of them, most of them,
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never went on to be musicians
in their professional lives,
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the careers they did choose
were incredibly diverse
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and they were so successful in them.
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and they continue to be so.
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What, if anything, did music education
have to do with that?
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So when it came time for me
to choose a topic for my PhD study,
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it became pretty clear pretty quickly,
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I wanted to know if music education
benefited brain development.
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What I found was a huge amount
of research, now two decades worth,
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conducted by neuroscientists.
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And the neuroscientists had stumbled
on something kind of by accident.
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They were looking at the brain functions
and structures of musicians,
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and, literally, their brains
looked different
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and they function differently
and in many cases, far more effectively.
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So the neuroscientists
started to do experiments
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that compared groups of musicians
with groups of non-musicians
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doing all manner of tasks.
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Now, it's important at this point
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to share the definition of musician
that the neuroscientists use.
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They believe it was someone
who learnt a musical instrument
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and had learnt it formally,
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meaning they'd had lessons
from an expert every week.
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They'd learnt how to read music,
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most of them had been involved in
ensemble music-making experiences,
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and they'd done it for a reasonably
long period of time,
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two years at the very least.
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Now, to help me explain
some of this research,
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I'm going to use, I hope -
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There we go! Thank you.
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I'm going to use some animation
from a TED Education film
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that I wrote and I helped to create
earlier this year.
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Now, the technology
that helped the neuroscientists
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allow them to see our brains
working in real time.
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And what they did is they used
fMRI machines and PET scanners
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to watch what was happening.
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They would get the participants
to do all sorts of tasks -
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reading, maths problems -
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and they would see
certain areas of the brain light up.
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But when they asked the participants
to listen to music, they saw fireworks.
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They had never seen so many areas
of the brain light up at the same time.
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So why did music education
have this impact on the brain?
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Well, what they found
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is that music education
works three areas of the brain at once:
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the motor, visual and auditory cortices.
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If we think about it,
it's like a full-brain workout;
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it's like our legs,our arms and our torso
doing an exercise at the same time.
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Music education is exercise for the brain.
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And among many, many other things,
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they also found that musicians had
a larger bridge, a larger corpus callosum,
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across the two hemispheres of the brain,
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which allowed the messages
to travel far more quickly
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and in very, very creative pathways.
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So what did this brain exercise mean
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for how musicians' brains
actually functioned?
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Again, among many,
many other things they found,
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they found that musicians
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were able to solve puzzles and problems
far more effectively and creatively.
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They found that musicians
had higher levels of executive function.
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Now, executive function is a complex
group of activities in our brain
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that solve those really complex problems
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that have logical, strategic, conceptual,
emotional elements to them.
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They also found that musicians
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had very highly developed
memory systems in their brain.
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And that they thought
this might have happened
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because when a musician makes a memory,
they actually put tags against it -
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an emotional tag, a visual tag,
a conceptual tag, a contextual tag.
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And overall, so far with these two decades
of research that we now have,
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they have found that music education
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raises the general cognitive capacity
of anyone who undertakes it.
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And even further to that,
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they've found that music education
helps us be comfortable with discomfort.
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Now, learning is uncomfortable:
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we're asking our brains and our bodies
to do things we've never done before.
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So music education actually helps us
be comfortable in that state.
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It helps us to feel
comfortable with learning.
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Now, I'd like to share with you
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two studies which, to me, highlight
some of the many applications and impacts
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that music education could have.
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First one involves babies.
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I've seen very trusting mothers
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allow their beautiful babies
to be put into fMRI machines
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so the neuroscientists
could monitor their brain functions
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as the mothers spoke to them,
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along with many other tasks.
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Now, I say "trusting mothers"
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because these babies
were between one and three days old.
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What the neuroscientists saw
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is that the babies were using
their music-processing networks
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to understand their mother's voices.
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Literally, they were hearing music
in their mother's voices.
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And this confirms something
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that the neuroscientists
had been thinking for a while,
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that music and language processing
are very closely connected in the brain,
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that, indeed,
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at birth we need our music processing
to understand our language:
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at birth, we are musical.
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The second study involves IQ points.
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And I know we could have
a whole other TED Talk about IQ points,
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but they are a well-used measure
of intellectual capacity.
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And in this study comparing musicians
with non-musicians,
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they found that those
that had undertaken music education
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before the age of seven
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had around about 7.5 IQ points higher
than those that had not.
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Now, 7.5 IQ points
doesn't sound like much,
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but if we put it in context, an IQ of 100
is said to be average or normal,
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an IQ of 130 is said to be genius
or entry into Mensa.
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So 7.5 points is huge.
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It's over 20%.
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And even further to that,
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another study looked
at the economic capacity vs. IQ point,
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how much more we would earn
per year, on average,
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per one IQ point that we had higher.
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What they found in today's dollars
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is that for every IQ point higher we have
is equal to about $700 per year.
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Let's take our 7.5 IQ points
for music education.
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That's about $5000 per year.
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Now think of that across 10 years,
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and suddenly we start to see
that music education
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could have an enormous impact
on every part of our society.
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Now, in every area of scientific study,
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it is incredibly important
to ask big questions
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and to look at the myths
that exist in that area.
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And there are two big ones in this area,
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and they are that to play music
we need to be smart
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and to play music we need to be talented.
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Neuroscientists have now done
a large number of randomized studies
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that have showed that music education
impacts everybody who undertakes it.
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You don't need to be smart to start with.
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And if we think back to that study
about babies, we're all born musical.
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We have to be to understand language.
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It is the experiences
and the opportunities that we have in life
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that realizes that talent.
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And this gets me thinking
even more about the fact
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that music education could be the glue
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that could bring together so many things
that we are dealing with
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in our educational systems
and our societies today.
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Let me give you some examples.
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Learning disorders.
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At the moment, many of them understood
to be a miscommunication
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between the left and the right
hemispheres of the brain.
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And as we saw earlier,
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music education actually makes
those two sides of the brain
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work together really well.
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ADHD, again, at the moment understood
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to be a mistiming between the motor,
visual and auditory cortices.
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And again, we saw before,
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music education actually makes
the three areas of the brain
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work together incredibly well.
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If we take it another step further,
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music education has been found to help us
acquire and understand language
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and to solve complex problems,
many of which involve numbers.
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How might universal music education
change literacy and numeracy
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in this country and in many
countries around the world
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where it's a very hot topic?
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Now, I think about all of these issues
in light of my own daughter,
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who's just turned four.
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And I think about her and her generation.
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I wonder what could universal music
education do for an entire generation?
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I think of in 10 years' time,
when she's 14,
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what might learning be like
in her classroom
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if the general cognitive capacity
has been raised of an entire generation.
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If literacy and numeracy levels
have been raised,
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if many of the learning
and behavioural disorders
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that we deal with today in classrooms
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have had the benefit of music education,
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how might our schools change?
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I jump again to 30 years' time,
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when she's 34.
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She could be doing
absolutely anything with her life.
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But again, if we raise the cognitive
capacity of an entire generation,
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how might that change our social,
cultural, economic, political landscape?
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Dare I say it, how might
the focus and quality
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about political debate
in this country change
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if that's the generation of voters
that they're trying to impress upon?
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I jump again to 70 years' time,
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when she's 74.
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I wonder about the quality
of her physical and mental health
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if we'd invested before the age of seven
in her brain health into later life.
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How might that impact our health budget?
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How might we be spending
our money differently
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if we've made an investment
back here in her generation
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that will impact in 70 years' time?
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And this gets me thinking
about a much larger issue with education.
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Too often, we play
the short game with education.
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It is a political football
that gets hit back and forth
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with every change in government.
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What if we played the long game?
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What if we invested now
in my daughter's generation
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before the age of seven
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in ways that now
the science has showed us
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we can absolutely
predict to the benefits,
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and in so many ways, we absolutely
cannot predict the benefits.
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Now, music education
is not the only answer,
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it's not the silver bullet
that we've heard of earlier.
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There is no single answer.
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But I know it was the answer for me.
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When I was seven or eight years old,
I was struggling to read.
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I could not untangle words and letters.
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And it wasn't through a lack of trying.
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My mother was a specialist
reading teacher.
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And at the age of nine,
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someone handed me a clarinet by mistake -
I was meant to get a flute.
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There was none left, so they said,
"Here you go. Have a clarinet."
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And I learnt how to play,
and I learnt how to read music.
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Within about six months, I'd untangled
those words and those letters.
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I have no proof that those two
are interconnected,
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but from all the research
that I have read
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and from the works I continue to see
the neuroscientists undertake,
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I'm sure they are connected.
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So now, with all of this research
and all of this knowledge,
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what can we do?
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I think the first thing we can do
is think differently.
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Music is a beautiful
and wonderful art form
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that almost every human being
on the planet enjoys
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in so many different ways
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every single day.
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But maybe we are missing
an opportunity with music education
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that could change our world
in ways we have no idea of.
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I think we could listen differently.
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When we hear that scratchy,
out-of-tune sound of a beginner violinist,
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don't think about how it offends our ears.
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Think about the fireworks
that are going off for that young child
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as they try so desperately
to get the right note.
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Think of the learning
that is going on for them.
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I think we could act differently.
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Instead of just going along to our child
or grandchild's end-of-year concert,
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ask the music teacher if you can go
to the rehearsal beforehand.
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See the learning happening.
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See the learning to be comfortable
with discomfort going on.
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See the fireworks.
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And if you have a child or a grandchild
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who's been playing trombone
for about six months
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and doesn't feel that
they're really getting anywhere
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and they ask you if they can give up,
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don't let them.
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Make a choice for them
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that they will thank you for
in the decades to come.
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Music education should be essential
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for every child.
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And if you look at our national curriculum
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and many national curriculums
around the world,
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it is a core part of it.
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And yet in a research a study recently,
relates to here in Australia,
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1.4 million children today do not have
access to a music teacher in their school.
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Music education is not for the talented.
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It is not a luxury, it's not an add-on,
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it's not a bonus, it's not a nice thing
if we had some extra money.
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It is essential.
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We take deliberate steps to teach
our children how to care for this planet
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so that they may enjoy it in the future.
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We take deliberate steps to teach
our children how to eat well, exercise
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and look after themselves
and make good choices
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so that they may live a full life.
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Why can't we take deliberate steps
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to raise the cognitive capacity
through music education
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of the next generation
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so that they can build
a better world for themselves?
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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