This study shows for the first time a causal role of dopamine in musical pleasure and motivation: enjoying a piece of music, deriving pleasure from it, wanting to listen to it again, being willing to spend money for it, strongly depend on the dopamine released in our synapses.

Possibly! This heavy duty article highlights the recent research which has found that music listening and performance has been found to influence how genes behave or regulate themselves. The first few sentences set the scene and we have done a translation for you.

Prof Schellenberg compared 114 articles about music training and brain development and then analysed the titles and abstracts for the inference of causational (one action causes another) findings and correlational (a connection between two things) findings.

Periodically the research community completes a systematic review, sometimes known as a literature review, of a given area of research.

Do you have similar musical tastes to your friends? How about your work colleagues? Do you think musical tastes tell us anything else about a person? This study thinks it might when it compared musical taste with political leaning.

Here is one hell of a tricky question – if your musical potential, meaning your likelihood of being successful at learning music (whatever that really means) could be measured, would you want to know?

In this recent study, drummers were researched because “Most people can only perform fine motor tasks with one hand and have problems playing different rhythms with both hands at the same time,” but, “Drummers can do things that are impossible for untrained people.”

Talk about a great experiment. Researchers in Sweden surveyed 83 sets of monozygotic (identical) twins to find 10 pairs who fit the following criteria – only one sibling in each pair currently played a keyboard instrument (piano, organ, keyboard) and within the pair, a difference in total hours of music practice was at least 1000 hours.

The ‘Music Learning Helps Learning Difficulties’ series consists of three information documents to provide you with the research behind how music learning helps a particular area of learning.

Studying how the brain processes music and how music changes the brain has fascinated neuroscientists for almost 30 years. But these two types of studies, how the brain processes music and how music changes the brain, are also very difficult.

Is it nature or nurture? Is it biological, magic or a quirk?

Research into music learning has found that, while it is a great activity for physical, cognitive, emotional and social development during childhood, it can be just as impactful to learn a musical instrument when we are adults.