Soft Mozart and Neuropsychology

Hi, everyone!

I am currently working on parents/ teachers training putting Soft Mozart Academy together.
While working on materials/quizzes I suddenly realized that many of us have really need to know more about this science. As for my personal experience, many obstacles of teaching in general and especially in teaching skills could be easily understood with the help of neurophysiology.

What helped this science to develop and why is it relatively young (most of the discoveries, data and researches were provided just in 20-21 century)? Unfortunately World War 1 and World War 2 + modern wars contributed a lot to our knowledge about how our brain functions and how it affect not just our bodies, but also our minds. Brain wounds helped scientists to understand many (not all!) of the things that we should know.

There are a lot of literature on Internet about it. You may start from Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology

I was working on the subject for decades collecting my data and research on that. My book 'You CAN me a musician' has a lot to do with neurophysiology as science pianolearningsoftware.com/collections/le...wnloadable_p_36-html

But it seems to me that I need to cut this 'elephant' to more pieces and write more little, but digestible information. I will try my best!

But my first question to all of you is: which hemisphere of every human being is getting to be developed first and at what age it passes it's priority to another?

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Many think that beginners play music pieces or dance out of beat, because they don’t have sense of beat and this ‘sense’ ought to be developed first. We forget that every one of us, in our mother’s womb and during our months of nursing and bottle feeding got plenty of such training much before anything else.

Let me explain how ‘senses’ or ‘feeling’ of steady beat get connected with development of rhythm.

First, ‘beat’ and ‘rhythm’ are not the same. A good metaphor is that beat is the ‘skeleton’ and rhythm is the “meat”, Neurologically, we have all developed neuron connections in our brain to be able to ‘catch the beat’ and reproduce the beat by using very simple moves, such as clapping, beating drums or making simple moves.

In fact, our body has tendency to be ‘hypnotized’ by steady beats (because this sense already imbedded in our cortex) and easily connects to the similar waives from outside world.

In this regard, if music, dance, gymnastics (you name it) educators start training with clapping, marching, playing 1-2 notes or developing any other simple skill claiming that this is the necessary first step to learn complex skill, it is not accurate from a neuropsychology point of view.

ANY complex skill (ballet, gymnastics, playing instrument) is a COMPLEX skill requiring all of the neurons responsible for our general and fine motor skills to be connected and work as a whole.

Therefore, for example, in learning piano it is better to compromise playing rhythmically in order to thoroughly develop connection between each move of each finger with neuron pathways in our brain. It establishes strong foundation for developing a COMPLEX skill. If one of the necessary part of such foundation is missing (balance, visual perception of music text, use of only certain fingers instead of all of them), the gap will occur that could be an obstacle in future development.

hellene wrote: Hi, everyone!

But my first question to all of you is: which hemisphere of every human being is getting to be developed first and at what age it passes it's priority to another?

Very good and useful subject!

The right hemisphere is the first, if I remember well from the books I read about this. And the thing is that it is dominant till 3-6 years of age or even more, depending on the brain development of each child and if the child has or not a brain injury. It does not pass its priority in an instant, but gradually in years or less, again, depending on the individual.

Andrea

Adrienne, I am sorry for being so late with my answer to your post!
Currently we are working on puppet theory video creations and it consumes all of my time!

msadrienne wrote: This is very interesting!

I think that traditionally we've been told that the right brain hemisphere develops first.

Everyone's right brain develops first, because it is responsible for emotions, senses, special awareness etc. The turning point is 3 year old, when left brain is getting the relay.

However, in my own children, I have seen such a huge difference between their development; our daughter was verbal at a young age and started reading and writing early. Is that considered right brain?

It looks like coordinated and balanced brain to me!

On the other hand, our son was much slower to talk and at six is struggling with reading, but he gets numbers like nobody's business, and does math that his big sister wasn't remotely interested in at that age. So I don't know.

Yes, he has a tendency to have dominating left brain for now. But he is growing and with proper training of corpus callosum and education he will be coordinating both equally efficient.

Rhythmically, both kids seem to be naturally at ease with feeling a steady beat.

Most of children have it. The problem is the connection between inner rhythm and coordination. It seems to me that your children coordination is very good.

What do you think about the work of Dalcroze (music and movement) and Edwin E. Gordon (music audiation)?

I am not familiar with their work. Could you, please, tell me in short, what the main ideas are?

In my master's degree project, I did a small study with about 20 students, and discovered an, admittedly small, correlation between playing with accurate rhythm in the lesson (especially in triple meter) and being able to accurately write and take rhythm dictation on the Iowa Test of Music Literacy aptitude test. I know that the most difficult issues to overcome for my students are related to rhythm rather than note-reading, but maybe I'm overlooking some reading problems that would actually solve those rhythm issues. ? Hmmm.

I agree with you about the issue with rhythm and note reading. Let's refer to Soft Mozart program: beginners master amount of correct notes on the left first before they ready to polish the pieces rhythmically. I think this happens because to coordinate 10 fingers is not easy task to begin with and before beginners lay a 'map' of sounds sequences out they don't have enough room in their mind to master pieces rhythmically.

In dictations they face different task: all they have to do is to handle a pencil, to listen to and to think. Different neuron pathways are involved in such process.

It means that to process audio information, to produce music and to write music down are 3 different 'projects' for our cortex. Later in life they 'meet' together to be a unit, but at the beginning they have to be treated as different for student's sake lol

It's all very interesting and I wonder how it all relates in terms of beginning note reading and success at the piano. Looking forward to reading more from Hellene on this.

Before Hellene came to existence there were many brilliant teachers, who developed main rules of didactics: from concrete to abstract, from simple to advanced, from personal experience to abstract generalization.

Neuropsychology is a relatively new science and finally it is backing up all the greatest teaching ideas!

It seems to me that all the ineffective learning approaches are ineffective in different ways, but all the effective are all the same.