Hi there.
Today in this podcast you can discover the incredible brain boosting benefits
of playing a musical instrument, learn about the fascinating
neuroscience behind it and hear about my personal journey of reconnecting
with my love of playing the piano.
Have you ever thought about how learning a musical instrument could
dramatically improve your brain function?
This isn't just an everyday language lesson.
It's the journey through the world of music-making, language and the brain.
Have you ever learned a musical instrument?
A musical instrument could be a guitar, a piano, a trumpet, or a set of drums.
Maybe you did it as a child, maybe you learned as an adult.
Or maybe you've never had the opportunity to do this.
But today I'm gonna talk about some of the benefits.
Benefits to the brain probably aren't what we normally think about when we're
imagining playing a musical instrument.
So let's have a look at what they are.
And if you stick around to the end, I'll talk also about my personal
experience of learning the piano.
So let's explore the magic of music and its impact on our cognitive
skills, all the while boosting your English language learning.
First of all, are you learning English and you're stuck at the
point where you can understand English, but you can't speak it well?
Two pieces of advice for you.
First of all, get a language partner, someone with whom you can
practise, someone who knows what stage you're at, and then they're
going to be patient with you.
Just an hour a week of English conversation like this will
really improve your speaking.
It doesn't take that much time.
The other thing you can do to make it easier, how about our
Most Common 500 Words Course?
This course ensures that you know all the common words in English really well.
And it's then easier to construct simple sentences.
That's how you'll start speaking.
Your English speaking journey has then begun.
So check out that course on our website at adeptenglish.com.
The Most Common 500 Words, it's on our Courses page.
You'll be glad you did!
So today's topic, learning a musical instrument.
Many of us had opportunity to do this as a child.
Perhaps something that our parents pushed us into, perhaps
something that we wanted to do.
But as an adult, it can be a hobby, which gives us a great deal of pleasure.
That's H O B B Y.
That means 'a pastime, a way of spending time'.
It offers us a lot in terms of pleasure and enjoyment, but have you thought about
how it might boost your brain health?
My particular instrument is piano.
I don't play regularly or particularly well - more of that later!
But piano gives you an excellent understanding of musical theory and
like most instruments, it exercises your brain in particular ways.
In fact, according to some, playing a musical instrument is like giving
your brain 'a whole body workout'.
It's like going to the gym for your brain!
And it's actually better than doing 'brain training' - those Mensa
exercises or crossword puzzles, which exercise the 'grey matter'.
We talk about brain function in English sometimes as 'grey matter'.
So why is playing a musical instrument so much better than doing a crossword puzzle?
Well, first of all, playing a musical instrument means that you are exercising
many areas of the brain at once.
It's visual, V I S U A L, which means 'you use your eyes'.
And that's, especially if you're reading music from a sheet like
this, that's a piece of piano music.
So you might be reading from sheet music, but you're also looking
at your fingers as you play.
And if you're reading music, then your brain is having to interpret
the symbols on the sheet and turn them into musical notes.
That's quite a process for your brain to do as well.
It's also auditory.
That's A U D I T O R Y.
That means 'it uses your ears, your hearing'.
So your brain is involved in listening.
You listen for pleasure, but if you're playing, you're also listening to see
how well you're doing, how it sounds, listening out for wrong notes, perhaps.
Certainly, that's me when I'm playing!
Clang.
Whoops.
A wrong note in the middle of your piece.
Playing an instrument also involves muscles, M U S C L E
S, usually muscles of the hands.
And to make music, we have to do what we call 'fine motor movements'.
' Anything to do with movement that's controlled by the brain we call
'motor skills' - that's M O T O R.
And of course this exercises yet another part of the brain.
Rather like what I recommend for learning English, listening to
podcasts over and over again, our brains learn to do amazing things
when we practise over and over again, and this is true with our hands.
The type of expert movements that we need to be able to do to play a
musical instrument - we call these 'muscle memory' in English, as though
the muscles are doing the remembering, but of course it's actually your brain.
So 'muscle memory' is yet another brain function going
on when we play an instrument.
If your further forward in your musical instrument playing, then
you'll want to put expression and emotion into your playing.
So that's yet another part of the brain, and that's hard to do unless you're
actually feeling some emotion as you play.
You may also be aware of the idea that your brain is separated into two halves,
the right and the left hemisphere.
And these two halves of the brain have different
functions, different jobs to do.
But the strength of the connections between these two halves of
the brain are really important.
The more integrated our brain, the more integrated our brain
function, the better we function.
And because of all these different brain functions going on at once,
left and right hemisphere, when you play a musical instrument, it
strengthens the connections between.
This part in the middle is called the 'Corpus Callosum'.
That's C O R P U S C A L L O S U M.
Increased thickness in the Corpus Callo sum is linked to greater
intelligence, processing speed and problem solving abilities.
We all want that, don't we?
Neuroscientific studies show that the connections in the two halves of the
brain are significantly strengthened in people who play a musical instrument,
and that's adults and children alike.
Something else happens when you play a musical instrument.
Your hippocampus grows - i t grows new neurons.
N E U R O N S.
And your neurons are the connections in your brain.
Even if you are good at playing your musical instrument, 'accomplished', we
might say, it's still difficult again, each time you learn a new piece of music.
And your hippocampus, the most human and thinking part of your
brain is being exercised every time you learn something new.
And especially if you learn a piece of music first from a sheet,
and then well enough to play it by ear without the musical sheet.
We call it 'by ear' in English when you play without sheet music in front of you.
So your hippocampus has to build new neural connections each
time you learn a new piece.
That's why it's hard work!
That's why people often prefer playing pieces they already know.
So playing a musical instrument also enhances your cognitive functions as well.
And guess what?
It also enhances your memory.
What can be better than that?
Another important element in our brain is something called 'myelin', M Y E L I N.
And this is the white substance that covers the neurons in our brain.
It covers the connections in our brain.
It's rather like a wire or a flex.
Imagine when you go to charge your mobile phone, you plug in and there's
a wire between the plug and your phone.
That wire has a plastic coating, and if that plastic coating is damaged,
all kinds of things can go wrong.
And it's the same with the myelin in your brain that coats the neural connections.
It's like a plastic cover.
As we get older, myelin reduces, and particularly in diseases
like Alzheimer's or dementia.
You start to lose the myelin in your brain, and this is a disaster.
But MRI scanning of the brain has shown that playing a musical
instrument, especially something like piano increases the amount of this
substance, this myelin in the brain.
So according to neuroscientists who've studied it, playing a musical instrument
is like no other activity for enhancing and improving your brain function.
Apparently sports and the arts, making art of some type don't even
come close, though they're great for other reasons, of course.
So perhaps after hearing this podcast, you might want to dust off that old
piano, that guitar, that trumpet, that French horn or whatever you may
have learned, and take it up again.
Or if you haven't learned a musical instrument, it is never too late to
start and it can be a real pleasure.
My experience?
Well, I was given piano lessons from the age of 7 to 14 years.
I enjoyed it for much of it, but by the time I was 14 and with a change
from my old favourite piano teacher to a new one I didn't like, like many
teenagers, I wanted to give up the piano.
Part of the problem was that when I was young, the only route to
learning was classical, and this didn't speak to my 14 year old self.
Nowadays, children can learn piano through the route of jazz or rock piano.
I think these would've appealed to me far more when I was that
age and I may have continued.
However, when I left full-time work to become a
psychotherapist, I bought a piano.
I took it up again, I had lessons and I passed my Grade 4 with Distinction.
That's the highest grade you can get, so I was very pleased.
But I was pregnant with my son at the time and with a baby and two
older children, I'm afraid the piano didn't get much time after that.
But having taken up the piano many years after I stopped and succeeded in
an exam, I know I can do that again.
It helps also having a nice instrument.
I have a nice upright Yamaha, just waiting for me whenever I want to play.
I do like my piano!
I hope you enjoyed this podcast and if you really want to improve your English,
listen to the podcast a number of times until you understand every bit of it,
and then a few more times after that.
Happy listening and happy playing a musical instrument.
Enough for now.
Have a lovely day.
Speak to you again soon.
Goodbye.