Dr Psyche Loui is a psychologist, neuroscientist and musician who investigates how music can be used to understand the brain. She is a violinist and works to connect our understanding of the brain with the experience of being a music learner and performing musicians.

There is an interesting term in this article – experience-dependent plasticity. Here is a good plain language definition that also happens to include a musical reference.

Here is one of those research sentences that are so useful when we are explaining how music learning impacts on every child’s development.

Finally, that song that keeps playing on a loop inside our heads for no apparent reason has a name – stuck song syndrome!

Do men and women hear differently? Maybe. This report speaks on the lack of auditory processing differences at birth and in young children, but how differences may appear in adolescents as puberty changes our brains and bodies.

If we can shut down our inner critic when we improvise, does that mean we could transfer that idea across to other parts of our lives. And, what does that mean for classically trained musicians?

If you are a musician, then you really do hear the world differently! This study looked at expectation and prediction, and if musical training had any influence on the differences we hear.

While musicality and working memory are mostly treated as clear predictors of foreign language learning ability, the relationship between brain morphology and language aptitude is far from obvious.

There is now an enormous amount of research that has explored, measured, quantified and illuminated the benefits of music education on cognitive, emotional, social and physical development. Such is the quantity and quality of the research that it is now understood that music education benefits the development of the whole person like no other human activity.

If you’re a musically trained person, your fluid intelligence is probably highly developed! But what is fluid intelligence?

In this study, released by Florida International University, they found that group music classes affected overall competence, confidence, caring, character and connection.

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.