Want to use more of your brain? Play music!

At the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Los Angeles several years ago, Dr. Lawrence Parsons of the University of Texas-San Antonio discussed the results of his research which showed that significantly more of the brain was being used during music making that previously thought. We have been taught for years that most of us use very little of our brain but it's not because we don't want to...it's because we don't know how to access more of it! If playing music will help us use more of our brain, bring out those instruments: drums, piano, horns, harps! Let the music begin!

"An understanding of the brain locations that represent the separate aspects of music will help us identify the neural mechanisms that are specific to music, specific to language and are shared between the two," says Parsons. "The finding that there is a right brain region for notes and musical passages that corresponds in location to a left brain region for letters and words illustrates how a neural mechanism may be present in each of the two brain hemispheres becomes special adapted for analogous purposes but with different information contexts."