Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

If you knew that music enhanced intelligence … enriched mental health … and increased your immune system to protect you against disease… would that change the way you whistle while you work?

In a new volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Blackwell Publishing Ltd. illustrates how music evolved and shows how we tend to respond to it. What kind of music do you like to listen to at critical moments of your day?

Contributors to this volume show how animals such as birds, dolphins and whales make melodious sounds out of a desire to imitate one another. Their ability to take in and imitate sounds is the same process needed to learn language… which leads to scientists’ conclusion that sounds animals make may well be precursors to human music.

Researchers discuss music training as a way to make humans smarter. They noticed more grey matter in the auditory cortex of the right hemisphere in musicians compared to non-musicians. They feel these differences are probably not genetic, but instead due to musical learning and practice. What do you think?