Posts Tagged ‘guitar’

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…