Verbal Memory Improved

Verbal Memory Improved by Music Training

In a study in the journal Nature, researchers studied a group of 60

female college students from the University of Hong Kong. Thirty

of these students had at least six years of musical training with a

Western musical instrument before age 12, and thirty of the

students had no musical training.

The musical and non-musical students were closely matched in

terms of age, grade point average, and years of formal education.

Researchers administered two types of tests to the college students.

In the verbal memory test, students heard a list of 16 words read

aloud, and the students were asked to recall as many words as

possible. In the visual memory test, students briefly saw simple

figures, and they were asked to draw the figures from memory. Each

test was given three times.

On the verbal test, the music students consistently outscored the

non-music students by an average of 16%. This means they

remembered an average of 2.56 more words from a list of 16

words than their non-music peers.

On the visual test, there was no significant difference between the

scores of the music students and non-music students.

A 1995 study of the magnetic resonance images (MRI) of

musicians' brains shows that the left planum temporale region is

larger in musicians than in non-musicians. This region of the brain

is responsible for verbal memory, while the right planum

temporale is responsible for visual memory. The difference in

brain structure and organization is believed to account for the

improved verbal memory demonstrated by musicians in the above

study.

Source: "Music Training Improves Verbal Memory" by Agnes S.

Chan, Yim-Chi Ho, and Mei-Chun Chuang, from the Chinese

University of Hong Kong. Printed in Nature, Vol. 396, November

12, 1998.