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Early musical training forms stronger brain connections

Published: 13 February 2013

Turns out your mother was right about practising the piano. A new study from Concordia University and the Montreal Neurological Institute backs up the nagging mothers of the world by showing that starting music lessons at a young age helps form stronger connections in the brain. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that musical training before age 7 has a significant effect on the development of the brain, an effect substantial enough to actually be seen on brain scans. That was what surprised researcher Virginia Penhune, a psychology professor at Concordia, who oversaw the study in collaboration with Robert Zatorre of the MNI, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University.

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