My neighbor Sister Xue’s eight-year-old son recently won the first prize for his outstanding violin performance in the city’s children’s talent competition. I congratulated her, and she said: "Seeing the child's excitement on the podium, I am very glad that I could firmly support him to learn the violin."

"When the child signed up to learn the violin, the family members Most of the relatives are opposed to it, and some say that learning musical instruments affects their children's learning, and some even say that learning musical instruments will make boys' personalities too soft..."

Indeed, compared with the current mainstream interest class training, such as English , Mathematical Olympiad, programming, etc., when children are asked to learn musical instruments, what most people think is:

“If you can’t eat a bowl of art, learning musical instruments is of no use.”

“ Learning a musical instrument seems to be about burning money and has nothing to do with me.”

“If you haven’t learned the major subjects of English, mathematics, and Chinese well, what do you do with learning a musical instrument?”

… …

What if the child is interested and wants to learn? As a parent, can you support his interests?

In fact, learning musical instruments has many benefits for children. In addition to improving children's aesthetic ability and artistic literacy, brain scientists have also made new discoveries:

MIT neuroscientist Robert DeSimone and his team conducted a study on the impact of musical instruments on children. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This study is like this:

Researchers randomly divided 74 4-5-year-old children in Chinese kindergartens whose native language was Chinese into three groups.

One group of children will take piano lessons three times a week, 45 minutes each time; another group of children will take extra reading classes; the third group will be the control group and will not take any other classes besides daily classes. . Six months later, the researchers tested the children's ability to identify the tones, initial consonants and final consonants of the words.

Test results show that children who have taken piano lessons are significantly better than children who have taken reading classes in identifying Chinese characters with different initial consonants. At the same time, the children in the first two groups were better than the children in the control group in identifying Chinese characters with different finals.

Researchers observed the children's brain activity through electroencephalography. They found that when they heard the rhythmic reading sound, the children in the piano group were more sensitive to changes in tone.

This means that learning musical instruments can improve children's ability to distinguish sounds, thereby improving their ability to learn languages.

Can learning a musical instrument really make children smarter?

The research results of neuroscientists tell you that it is indeed.

Scientists used MRI technology to scan the brains of musicians and found that when the musicians played instruments, various important areas in the brain reacted strongly to music. For example, playing musical instruments that require both hands, such as the piano, stimulates and exercises the corpus callosum. This part connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain and is very important. If it is stimulated for a long time, a person's coordination ability will be greatly improved; The tactile response when playing a musical instrument or dancing stimulates the motor cortex in the brain, which is the part that specifically controls human body movements. In addition, other parts of the brain involved when playing musical instruments include the hippocampus responsible for memory function, the amygdala responsible for emotional control, the visual cortex responsible for visual perception and reaction, etc. These important parts produce important effects when cooperating with the conductor to play music. It creates harmonious brain waves and optimizes brain function.

Scientists have found that children who are not good at mathematics can have better mathematical understanding after receiving training in musical instrument playing. This is because when playing a musical instrument, you need to constantly touch the instrument with your fingers, and the finger perception training Strengthening can drive the somatosensory area of ????the child's brain for visual thinking training, and mathematics, a subject that mainly focuses on abstract thinking analysis and understanding, exactly needs visual thinking to supplement and improve.

Research shows that the mental activity of performing spatial analysis is the same as learning to play an instrument. When playing an instrument, our brains seem to process spatial information. The longer we play, the more this ability improves. More, it can be increased by up to 30%. What is spatial analysis capability? For example, to solve particularly difficult problems and arrange complex things, we must first understand the relationship between them. This requires us to have spatial analysis capabilities to imagine and process spatial information.

When children play musical instruments, music improves their brain function and enhances their auditory attention, which is an ability that allows them to distinguish different sounds and perform auditory memory. The longer a child plays an instrument, the better a child's ability to remember what he or she hears will be. In layman's terms, it means enhancing a child's memory.

Some children sing while playing an instrument, which can help them learn faster and be less likely to forget. Playing exciting music causes the brain to produce more dopamine, a hormone that makes us happy and makes us happy. When a child's emotions are in a happy state, the brain is more receptive to new things and different ideas, promoting better learning abilities.

In addition, we can notice that children who start reading music scores and practicing musical instruments from an early age will generally have better visual functions and motor skills than their peers.

Learning a musical instrument has so many benefits for children. If your child is interested in playing an instrument, bravely support him to learn it! If your child has not shown any obvious interest and you want to enlighten your child in music, you can try this:

But there is no need to regard listening to music as a very special thing. If the parents are not special, Preference, it can provide children with a diverse music environment, let children get used to the company of music, and stimulate children's cognition of music.

Before learning a musical instrument, in addition to listening to music for your child, you should also observe what kind of music your child likes to play. Some children have a special liking for the piano, while others are more fascinated by violin concertos. If you find that your child likes the music of certain instruments, it is very likely that he is particularly sensitive to the timbre of this instrument.

Expose your children to a master-level music environment. You can also tell them stories about how music masters became famous, and watch biographical movies of the masters together.

Because for children who are just starting to learn musical instruments, the things they practice in the early stages are very boring. It can let children know in advance that after boring basic practice, they can play beautiful music like the masters. This is also an invisible incentive.

In short, before a child starts to formally learn a musical instrument, it is necessary to help him establish a perceptual understanding of music in order to further stimulate his interest in music.

I have made up my mind to cultivate my daughter's interest in learning musical instruments. If I love her, I will let her learn musical instruments.