Music lessons are sometimes sold as a sort of cognitive training. Put a child in front of a piano, the story goes, and they’ll get smarter. Mainstream news headlines have helped fuel the belief, ...

Parents have long treated piano recitals and violin lessons as a kind of academic insurance policy, a cultural bet that practicing scales today will mean higher test scores tomorrow. Psychologists are ...

Cognitive decline represents a major barrier to healthy aging. A key challenge for successful aging is to discover interventions that prevent age-related cognitive decline. Musical training has the ...

Learning to play a musical instrument can change your brain, with a U.S. review finding music training can lead to improved speech and foreign language skills. Although it has been suggested in the ...

In a previous Psychology Today blog post, "Musical Training Optimizes Brain Function," I wrote about a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience which reported that playing an instrument before ...

Music perception and training constitute a multidisciplinary field that explores the intricate interplay between acoustic signals, neural processing and experiential learning. At its core, the study ...

Inherent auditory perception skills influence the effects of music training on speech processing ability, a study suggests. Music training is thought to augment neural encoding of speech in the brain, ...

Musical people find it easier to focus their attention on the right sounds in noisy environments. This is shown in a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Science Advances. The ...