Posts Tagged ‘musical ability’

A question for Martin, Shaun, Will and anyone else who’s done the training for a while

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Hey guys,

I’ve had a look around in the improvements section of the blog but I couldn’t really find any posts on the topic so i figured i’d just ask.

I was wondering how you feel the training has affected your day-to-day life and what improvements you’ve noticed. At the moment I’m feeling quite good in general. I would almost say that I feel more rational than usual, and I find it easier when I have problems to disassociate myself from my emotions and look at it more objectively.

Also, I am a musician, and I’m finding that the things that I’ve been working on in my practice have been coming together recently at a much faster rate than usual. It may just be that I’ve been working on these things for long enough now that they’re showing up anyway, but perhaps the working memory training helps conversion to long term memory as well?

Anyway, I’m just interested in your experiences. Personally, I’m not too fussed about what number I get on an IQ test, I’m interested in being as successful as possible, especially as I work in an industry that has a lot more people looking for work than there are jobs.

Regards,

Scott

Trained Musicians Think Differently

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

A new study by Vanderbilt University psychologists shows that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

I found this study particularly interesting. I happened to read about it a couple of days after hearing from a Brain Fitness Pro customer that he’d found the training really helped his guitar playing. I’d found the same thing with my piano playing.

I’d attributed this effect to the increased power I had to hold in my mind what I was playing at the same time as what I would be playing next. But I now wonder whether the enhanced musicianship might not also have something to do with the way the software trains both the aural and visual senses in a multi-tasking quantitative mental task…