How do you get to Carnegie Hall? New research on the brain’s capacity
to learn suggests there’s more to it than the adage that “practise
makes perfect.” A music-training study by scientists at the Montreal
Neurological Institute and Hospital -The Neuro, at McGill University and
colleagues in Germany found evidence to distinguish the parts of the
brain that account for individual talent from the parts that are
activated through training.
The research involved brain imaging studies of 15 young adults with
little or no musical background who were scanned before and after they
underwent six weeks of musical training. Participants were required to
learn simple piano pieces. Brain activity in certain areas changed after
learning, indicating the effect of training. But the activity in a
different set of brain structures, measured before the training session
had started, predicted which test subjects would learn quickly or
slowly.
“Predisposition plays an important role for auditory-motor learning
that can be clearly distinguished from training-induced plasticity,”
says Dr. Robert Zatorre, a cognitive neuroscientist at The Neuro who
co-directs Montreal’s International Laboratory for Brain, Music and
Sound Research (BRAMS) and is lead author of the study in Cerebral
Cortex. “Our findings pertain to the debate about the relative influence
of ‘nature or nurture,’ but also have potential practical relevance for
medicine and education.”
The research could help to create custom-made interventions for
students and for neurological patients based on their predisposition and
needs.
Future cognitive neuroscience studies will explore the extent to
which individual differences in predisposition are a result of brain
plasticity due to previous experiences and to people’s genetics.
I’m sorry but if education turns into “we must scan your kid’s brain to determine their best life course,” then I’m homeschooling and moving away from civilization. While the science is fascinating and worth applauding, I’m always going to think the human mind is too complex to believe it’s possible to predict a person’s abilities.
Indigenous cultures in places where bears are native often give them great reverence in part because their skeletons have a lot of features that look very human-like, like their forepaws looking quite hand-like. And I’ve seen more than one post online with someone having found a partial bear skeleton without skull and freaking out because they think they found human remains.
I say, I mean I say boy! You can’t destroy capitalism without destroying the material conditions that made it possible! It’s dialectics, son! Don’t you get it?
