Music lessons help children's memories

Music lessons improve children's memories and may give them an advantage in school, scientists said today.

Hours spent practising piano scales develop the left side of the brain, where both musical ability and memory connected with words are chiefly centred.

Scientists think learning music acts as a kind of "cross-training" which, as a side-effect, boosts verbal memory skills. Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong initially studied 90 boys aged between six and 15.

Half were members of the school orchestra and had been taught to play classical music for up to five years. The other 45 had no musical training.

All the children were tested to see how many words they could recall from lists. They were also given a visual memory test. The scientists, led by Dr Agnes Chan, found that boys who took music lessons recalled significantly more words than non-musical students.

Pupils with the longest musical training had the best verbal memory. The visual memory tests failed to show similar differences.

A follow-up study a year later revealed that boys who gave up music could no longer match the verbal memory of those who continued. But they had not lost the verbal memory advantage gained before they dropped out.

Dr Chan compared the effect to a runner finding that stronger legs helped them play tennis better, though they never set out to improve their tennis. Musical training led to a "greater extent of cortical re-organisation in the left temporal region".

"Students with better verbal memory probably will find it easier to learn in school," added Dr Chan.

The evidence was more conclusive than previous claims that listening to Mozart improves certain aspects of intelligence.