Rapid changes in technology are always exciting. Now kids can watch their music on DVD. Exhausted parents welcome this ‘good’ way to keep kids quiet and entertained. But what are the implications?
Most people agree it’s unhealthy for growing children to watch too much television. Yet now we’re sitting them down to watch DVDs. Is it somehow healthier to be a ‘music-video’ couch-potato than a TV couch-potato?
Research points to music as a key stimulator of children’s development, learning, and creativity; it is the audio that they actively respond to. Kids need to move, to dance and sing, and play along. They learn through sensory stimulation and involvement.
When it comes to developing creativity, children also need to use their own imagination, making their own pictures, movements and sounds rather than passively digesting someone else’s.
Studies at McMaster University in Ontario suggest that children receiving greater exposure to music at home show enhanced brain auditory activity; around three years in advance unexposed children.
To quote Norman M. Weinburger, from his article Music & the Brain’ in Scientific American, “Findings to date indicate that music has a biological basis and that the brain has a functional organisation for music… supporting perception, or evoking emotional reactions. Musicians appear to have additional specializations, particularly hyperdevelopment of some brain structures.”
He also has a titbit for we parents and teachers as we relax with a good CD after work, that “ . . . music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.”
Neuroscientists don’t yet know it all, but they have discovered that the pattern of a melody matters, that the auditory cortex forms a ‘frequency map’ across its surface, and that learning retunes the brain. Using music, ‘super-learning’ is possible, with retention rates up 85 percent.
For thousands of years children have thrived on the pure audio of song and music. We are multi-sensory beings, and it is time to come to our senses; all of them, not just a current mono diet of image-based media.
Children not only deserve pure audio, but it just may set them on the road to becoming little geniuses. As Albert Einstein said:
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
Albert Einstein
Last Updated: October 05, 2008