Music: John Medina’s “Brain Rules for Baby”

10 years of music lessons

There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training.  Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids – those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7- responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry.  The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all the while eavesdropping on the musician’s brainstem (the most ancient part of the brain) to see what happened.

Kids with rigorous musical training didn’t show much discrimination at all. They didn’t pick up on the fine-grained information embedded in the signal and were, so to speak, more emotionally tone deaf. Dana Strait, first author of the study, wrote: “That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we’d expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings.”

This finding is remarkable clear, beautifully practical, and a bit unexpected. It suggests that if you want happy kids later in life, get them started on a musical journey early in life. Then make sure they stick with it until they are old enough to start filling out their applications to Harvard, probably humming all the way.

Labeling Emotions: John Medina’s “Brain Rules for Baby”

Labeling emotions is neurologically calming

Here’s what we think is going on in the brain.  Verbal and non-verbal communication are like two interlocking neurological systems. Infants’ brains haven’t yet connected these systems very well. Their bodies can feel fear, disgust, and joy way before their brains can talk about them.  This means that children will experience the physiological characteristics of emotional responses before they know what those responses are. That’s why large feelings are often scary for little people (tantrums often self-feed because of this fear). That’s not a sustainable gap.  Kids will need to find out what’s going on with their big feelings, however scary they seem at first. They need to connect these two neurological systems.  Researchers believe that learning to label emotions provides the linkage.  The earlier this bridge gets constructed, the more likely you are to see self-soothing behaviors, along with a large raft of other benefits.  Researcher Carroll Izard has shown that in households that do not provide such instruction, these nonverbal and verbal systems remain somewhat disconnected or integrate in unhealthy ways.  Without labels to describe the feelings they have, a child’s emotional life can remain a confusing cacophony of physiological experiences.