Archive for the ‘musicians’ Category

When I was in high school, I remember my band director telling me that he had done a study on band students at our school and he found that students that were involved in a band program had higher GPAs then other organizations within the high school.

I have often thought that to be a professional musician or a highly skilled jazz musician that it takes much more brainpower than the average profession – one that simply memorizes facts and applies them within their daily work. There are some professions, of course, that must constantly exhibit a high level of creativity such as surgeons, trial attorneys, and scientists dealing with research and development, just to name a few.

But the reality is, many jobs these days do not require a high level of “thinking” when it comes to simply completing the job at hand. In other words, a roofer simply lays the roof without a high level of thought. Even a profession such as nursing, often comes down to routine tasks done over and over again.

With that being said, there has been some research done recently that substantiates the fact that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of the population. A study at Vanderbilt University found that professionally trained musicians use a creative technique called divergent thinking. It also found that musicians use both the left and right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

This research was done by a group of Vanderbilt psychologists. One of the psychologists put it this way:

“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ‘out of the box. We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity.”

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking – i.e. the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score. (my band director was right!)

This article was sent to me via a subscriber to pdfjazzmusic.com. Click here to read the entire article.
it really is a fascinating read.

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