Creativity is one of the most remarkable human faculties, but also one of the most mysterious. While legend has it that innovative ideas spring from nowhere, in reality, they are the result of complex mechanisms involving several brain networks.
The practice of music is believed to facilitate this creative process.
Researchers at the Italian universities of L’Aquila and Teramo came to this conclusion after conducting an experiment involving 83 healthy participants with an average age of between 19 and 20. Some of them had studied music at a conservatoire, while others had never received any formal education in music.
Regardless of their level of musical training, all the volunteers took several tests to assess their working memory and divergent thinking. The latter refers to the ability to come up with numerous and varied ideas: it contrasts with convergent thinking, or the ability to find a particular answer or solution to a given problem.
Previous studies have shown that divergent thinking is influenced by various psychological factors, including personality traits and emotional intelligence, but also by cognitive processes such as working memory.
Working memory enables people to manipulate and retain information while carrying out a task or activity. It allows us, for example, to perform a mental calculation or retain a telephone number long enough to write it down. It functions as a buffer in which events, words, dates or images are held temporarily, before being forgotten or stored in long-term memory.
The authors of this research, published in the journal Brain Science, found that individuals with formal music education appear to have better working memory. They also performed better when tested on divergent thinking.
The academics concluded that “musical practices increase divergent thinking due to working memory competences, which allow divergent thinking to activate associative processes and allocate attention resources”.
While this study highlights the importance of music education in the development of cognitive skills, it should be noted that the research was carried out on a relatively small number of participants, all of similar age. Different results could, therefore, emerge from research carried out on more varied demographic groups.
Still, this research does shed new light on the benefits of music education for the development of the mind. Indeed, listening to music, singing or playing an instrument has been proven to have multiple benefits for the brain’s overall cognitive functioning throughout one’s lifetime.