Music, art and the developing brain
Youth Eastside Services
Invest in Youth BreakfastHow does listening to the waltz impact infants’ brains? Dr. Patricia Kuhl and doctoral student Christina Zhao set out to find out.
They constructed an experiment in which babies listened to waltz music over the course six weeks. The results show how our brain learns to recognize patterns so it can move on to other creative tasks.
“We have this artificial separation between cognition and say, music and art in the schools,” Kuhl says. “We haven’t time for music, because we have to strengthen kids cognitive skills for tests—it’s so artificial. Brains don’t work that way, whole children don’t work that way.”
Read the full interview on Southern California Public Radio.