How efficiently is your brain working today? Music learning trains the brain to use fewer brain resources when compared with non-musically trained people (and in this case those who are also bilingual).

One of BBB’s favourite researchers, Dr Patricia Izbicki, has done all the hard work for us and summarised the five great reasons why music learning is the childhood experience that just keeps on giving well into our later life.

Drummers, very unfairly, can be the target of some pretty mean jokes and stereotypes. For example, What do you call a drummer with half a brain? Gifted!

Music learning has so many amazing benefits for students, but did you know that music learning is often used as a therapy tool for children with autism?

Do you use background music when you are completing a creative task? If you do, do you find that your creative output is better, more innovative or unexpected, or does the background music hinders these outputs?

Do you know someone who struggles to hear the emotions in speech? The skills of “hearing” prosody in speech are fundamentally musical. It is the melody and rhythm of speech, mixed in with the facial and physical expressions that went along with the speech, that our brains use to interpret emotions in speech.

Bilingualism and music learning have often been connected when it comes to auditory processing development. Do you know why? The reason for this connection is that music and language share an overlapping neural network.

In a new study, it has been found that preschoolers who have better vocabulary and attention skills are more likely to do better at school. This is not a shocking finding. Early childhood educators have been aware of this connection and indeed school readiness programs focus on building both of these skills.

A lot of the headlines point to the connection between listening to music and lessening productivity. The important detail to notice is which particular type of activity the participants were less productive in..

An extensive study has been released which found that students who studied music in primary school and into high school were almost one year ahead of their non-musically trained peers in their Maths, Science and English performance.

Arthur (Brooks, leading US economist and social scientist) was once asked whether he’d learned anything as a serious musician that applied to his current work…