Musical training has recently gained additional interest in education as increasing neuroscientific research demonstrates its positive effects on brain development. Neuroimaging revealed plastic changes in the brains of adult musicians but it is still unclear to what extent they are the product of intensive music training rather than of other factors, such as preexisting biological markers of musicality. Psychological and neuroscientific research demonstrates that musical training in children is associated with heightening of sound sensitivity as well as enhancement in verbal abilities and general reasoning skills. Studies in the domain of auditory cognitive neuroscience have begun revealing the functional and structural brain plasticity underlying these effects. Furthermore, music is also known to have a powerful emotional impact. Neuroimaging studies have shown that musically induced emotions involve very similar brain regions that are also implicated in non-musical basic emotions. Listening to music requires certain perceptual abilities, including pitch discrimination, auditory memory, and selective attention in order to perceive the temporal and harmonic structure of the music as well as its affective components and engages a distributed network of brain structures.
