Working memory is our temporary storage unit for information. It is the folder we put our daily timetable in, what we need to take with us to work or school.

“I succeeded as an entrepreneur not despite the fact that I had a music degree, but precisely because of it.” This statement came from Panos Panay, the founding managing director of the Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship at Berklee College of Music.

Here is a question we get from parents all the time – should I let my teenager listen to music while they study?

This study followed the students for two years and measured how the different types of music learning impacted on several executive function skills.

“Musical training can improve attention and working memory, which are executive functions that are important for daily life and are correlated with general better outcomes during lifespan.”

This is where the power of the story is. It is not simply that music learning has transformed a school and its students; it is HOW it has done it.

As students worldwide are having educational experiences that are a little or a lot different to their “normal”, teachers are looking for ways to maintain students’ engagement in a similar way to when they are attending “normal” school.

For almost a decade now we have understood that music listening activates the reward network in the brain.

What is musical play? Is it bashing on an upturned drum in the playground or banging pots and pans on the kitchen floor? Well, it can be both.

After 12 weeks of 35 minutes of active music learning every day, randomly chosen preschoolers in the experiment group had higher scores on all of these executive function measures.

To get control of our inhibitory control, preschoolers might first need to get a hold of the beat!

Prof Usha Goswami found that “dyslexia is not caused by children reading words incorrectly, but instead, by their inability to hear the rhythm of words when they are being spoken.”