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Playing music helps sharpen kids' brains

AP, Los Angeles
The founder of a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides free music lessons to low-income students from gang-ridden neighborhoods began to notice several years ago a hopeful sign: Kids were graduating high school and heading off to UCLA, Tulane and other big universities.
That's when Margaret Martin asked how the children in the Harmony Pro ject were beating the odds.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois believe that the students' music training played a role in their educational achievement,
helping as Martin noticed 90 percent of them graduate from high school while 50 percent or more didn't from those same neighborhoods.
A two-year study of 44 children in the program shows that the training changes the brain in ways that make it easier for youngsters to process sounds, according to results reported in Tuesday's edition of The Journal of Neuroscience. That increased ability, the researchers say, is linked directly to improved skills in such subjects as reading and speech.
But, there is one catch: People have to actually play an instrument to get smarter. They can't just crank up the tunes on their iPod.
Nina Kraus, the study's lead researcher and director of Northwestern's auditory neuroscience laboratory, compared the difference to that of building up one's body through exercise. "I like to say to people: You're not going to get physically fit just watching sports," she said.
Kraus said studies like hers are challenging because researchers need to follow subjects for years in order to track changes in the brain. She said more and larger studies need to be done in a variety of districts around the country to "help us understand what are the most effective forms of learning and how might learning be tailored for
an individual child."
The latest findings are striking a chord with supporters of such programs who say music is frequently the first cut for school boards looking to save money.
"Over and over, we've learned that children need rich, multisensory environments, and learning music sort of brings all of that into a package for them," said Mary Luehrsen of the National Association of Music Merchants Foundation, which awards scholarships and research grants for the study of music, adding that the results make the point that music training should be an important part of all school curriculums.
April Benasich, a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study, said previous research by Kraus has demonstrated the value of music is improving concentration, memory and focus in children.