I dislike the sensationalization in the article ("Put down the banjo, Timmy"). The headline makes it sound like learning music is about as useless as sitting on your couch, as far as intelligence goes. But it goes on to say that the study talks about looking at a wide range of studies and stating that quality studies compare music learning with control groups that do other types of activities, like sports.
You don't really need a PhD in psychology to figure out that any activity that involves putting effort over long periods of time will yield _some_ sort of result. Whether that actually translates directly to hyper-specific measurements (e.g. school math grades) as opposed to only "soft" long-term changes in behavior (e.g. developing an interest in the relationship between music and math, leading to e.g. an interest in software engineering over medicine, or an increased interest in arts, or whatever) seems to me like asking the wrong question.
Both music and intelligence are incredibly multidimensional. Trying to narrowly define a supposed correlation between two very narrow aspects of both might be a disservice to the idea of the development of a well rounded individual. I feel that many people take these sorts of soundbite titles to heart as if they were little life hacks to "get ahead", rather than thinking about life as a holistic experience.
> The headline makes it sound like learning music is about as useless as sitting on your couch, as far as intelligence goes.
Isn't that kind of what the study says though? It specifically concludes:
> Moreover, recent correlational studies have confirmed that music engagement is not associated with domain-general cognitive skills or academic performance.
What I understand from this study is that whether you learn music or sit on your couch will have no difference on your cognitive abilities and only make you better at music if you do the former.
The study also mentions that you can't transfer skills to different domains. I think this further reinforces their conclusion.
> While human cognition has been shown to be malleable to training, transfer of skills appears to be limited to the training domain and, at best, other similar domains. [...] Near transfer – i.e., the transfer of skills within the same domain – is sometimes observed, far transfer – i.e., the transfer of skills across two distant domains – is rare or possibly inexistent.
While music can have positive effects, those would be mostly limited your general well-being, will not make you smarter and can be achieved through other activities as well.
> Music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem. These possible advantages are not likely to be specific to music, though. In fact, any enticing and empowering activity may improve children’s well-being.
What I understand from this study is that whether you learn music or sit on your couch will have no difference on your cognitive abilities and only make you better at music if you do the former.
That's in stark contradiction to:
The authors found studies with high-quality design, such as those which used a group of active controls – children who did not learn music but instead learned a different skill, such as dance or sports, for example – showed no effect of music education on cognitive or academic performance.
The comparison is to children engaged in some sort of behavior, not passively sitting on the couch consuming tv.
Also the whole concept of measuring intelligence in itself is dubious at best. IQ tests in particular are nothing more than measures of how good someone is at taking tests and not a good measure of intelligence.
> > The headline makes it sound like learning music is about as useless as sitting on your couch, as far as intelligence goes.
> Isn't that kind of what the study says though? It specifically concludes:
> > Moreover, recent correlational studies have confirmed that music engagement is not associated with domain-general cognitive skills or academic performance.
> What I understand from this study is that whether you learn music or sit on your couch will have no difference on your cognitive abilities and only make you better at music if you do the former.
That's actually not quite clear to me, the article says:
>The authors found studies with high-quality design, such as those which used a group of active controls – children who did not learn music but instead learned a different skill, such as dance or sports, for example – showed no effect of music education on cognitive or academic performance.
That seems to indicate that siting on the couch is not the same. It also changes the title somewhat, to "learning music is not better than dance or sport to improve cognitive skills"
Perhaps so for specific cognitive measurements, but you quoted yourself a semi-contradictory blurb:
> Music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem.
(at least, I'm not aware of any claims of sedentarism being correlated with anything positive)
One could argue that some aspects of intelligence do fall in the "nature" realm (as opposed to being nurturable), but for _practical purposes_, one ought to consider the application of said intelligence to real life scenarios, and I think improvements in prosocial behavior and self-esteem can certainly be important factors there.
> Music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem.
Learning music, incuding an instrument to play on, teaches a ton of skills (focus, effortful practice techniques, managing failure and your limits, adapting what you have learned to different but similar music, work with other musicians on duets and more, etc) that you can learn through other mechanisms (athletics, LEGO/FIRST robotics, regular schoolwork). If anything, the ability to encounter a new piece of music (say jazz), connect it to styles or pieces you already understand, then to improvise off the style and make it your own is a process many developers do week to week with reading and adapting old code. You can't master one then immediately excel at the other but the base skills related to patience and effort connect.
Anecdotally, I learned a few instruments growing up and although I resented part of the process I think it benefited me a ton. I felt like I had a drop off in focus and effort applied to tasks after I stopped paying after high school. I met and kept a ton of awesome friends through music and playing in school bands. I have a lot of memories and success stories that come from learning an instrument and how music works. That was compelling when learning about physics and sound or how in tune notes are created based on a mathematical equation. It was super helpful to connect with others who learned an instrument growing up, like a few of my friends I see (not anymore) or talk to weekly. So I can be a data point for the prosocial argument as well as self esteem. I think the process helped me get to where I am today, even if I don't play anymore.
From a neurological perspective, this seems to be at loggerheads with findings that active brain engagement (puzzles, games, music, etc) can help push out alzheimer's and such degenerative diseases.
At first read, I felt an urge to conspiracy theorize that the study was sponsored to help direct funding to other areas of schooling instead of increasing funding overall.
The article says that studies which controlled against dance or sports showed no additional effect. Which looks really good for music IMO- because exercise has incredible benefits.
Maybe as compared to sports, music doesn't show additional benefit- how about as compared to watching YouTube videos? Playing flappy bird?
I find it hard to believe that we can really 'prove' anything with respect to child development. The studies have a phenomenally low lack of control on one end, which produces a LOT of noise. On the other end- we have no effective ways of measuring child development. Standardized tests or IQ produce metrics that are somewhat useful to measure how productive a child may be, but is that really what you want to optimize for as a parent?
What we really want to do for our kids is optimize for lifelong happiness. And we aren't even remotely close to measuring that.
A better question is: why do you learn or teach music?
Learning music provides plenty of benefits for the development of children, but nobody teaches music with the specific goal of rendering people smarter.
Many people force their children to learn an instrument with the expectation that it will make them more intelligent, and lead to better life outcomes.
My parents didn't do that but I did after watching a documentary that I can't remember name of. In the end though, I just beat my computer chair for a little bit of fun and haven't touched the guitar.
Not trying to be argue for the sake of arguing, but is there some data to back this claim up? Anecdotally I'm aware of many parents who think music makes their kid well rounded, but I'm not aware of parents that specifically believe learning music makes their kid more intelligent in non-musical areas.
> I'm not aware of parents that specifically believe learning music makes their kid more intelligent in non-musical areas.
It is all anecdotal evidence, but I am aware of some parents who "forced" their baby (and then little kid) to listen to classical music (specifically Mozart), because the kid would become a genius. Apparently, after some googling, it is called the "Mozart effect". Here are press articles about it:
Could it be a motivation for teaching music to little kids? That is what is suggested in the conclusions of the articles linked above, and which I quote below. Some parents might be receptive to these conclusions.
From the Scientific American article [1]:
> Rather than passively listening to music, Rauscher advocates putting an instrument into the hands of a youngster to raise intelligence. She cites a 1997 University of California, Los Angeles, study that found, among 25,000 students, those who had spent time involved in a musical pursuit tested higher on SATs and reading proficiency exams than those with no instruction in music.
From the BBC article [2]:
> There is a way in which music can make a difference to your IQ, though. Unfortunately it requires a bit more effort than putting on a CD. Learning to play a musical instrument can have a beneficial effect on your brain. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive scientist at Western University in London, Ontario says that a year of piano lessons, combined with regular practice can increase IQ by as much as three points.
I remember lots of posters aimed at parents around the music room, with pictures like a tray of surgical instruments as well as a wooden reed. With some caption like "Music improves life outcomes" or something like that.
It was a big argument for music funding when the band and orchestra parents were engaged in their annual battle to preserve funding for the school music program when I was a kid in the 70s/80s.
Depends who you ask. If you ask a music teacher I am sure they will cite chapter and verse for why music is the ultimate learning experience for children, along with many more reasons why they teach it. When I was in school we had to choose an extracurricular activity - band, chorus, etc. If students and their parents did not have to choose an arts class, but instead chose to use that time to double reading or math, it would lead to decreased funding and employment for those teachers.
Ultimately music is a language. Again, there are plenty of arguments about the benefits of learning (a) new language(s).
That said, I don't think teachers can argue in good faith that learning a particular will make you smarter versus learning another. Are multilingual people more intelligent than monolingual? Are people fluent in Ruby smarter than those fluent in PHP?
A better argument would be, learning music could potentially unlock the ability to learn new languages. Debatable, but I'd agree with that.
There is a difference, though, between learning something as a hobby, which is what most people learning music do, and mastering an instrument, which is a lifelong pursuit. The pursuits different, and so are the rewards. Learning something as a hobby will provide benefits, but none that can be associated with gaining more intelligence.
> Each time I read a story about how doing X improves a child's ability I simply think, well yeah, paying more attention to them does that.
This is a problem with a lot of research on educational methodologies as well, in that there is usually some selection bias being applied to the teachers participating in a study, as well as a placebo effect.
This only concerns tiger moms. I learnt a bit of music when 10-12 and I am forever grateful for that, because music is a bridge between your senses and a lot of physics phenomena. It is a way to create bridges between feelings/senses and knowledge. For example, you can hear how a DSP filter or a modulator changes the original signal; you find the reasons why an engine with a certain number of cylinders sounds better; and so on.
Happened to me as well. Saved at least two guys from losing a tire because of loose nuts, and one from losing the engine because it was sounding 'dry' or 'treble-y' because it was losing the oil.
Of course, this could be the "swimmer's fallacy", perhaps I hear better than average (I certainly have poorer eyesight than average), but then again, if one gets a swimmer body but does not have access to a pool, won't become a swimmer.
Yeah and even then a high iq is not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe for a career that requires a lot of logic, sciences, etc., but certainly not for the majority of careers.
“The authors found studies with high-quality design, such as those which used a group of active controls – children who did not learn music but instead learned a different skill, such as dance or sports, for example – showed no effect of music education on cognitive or academic performance.“
If you can acquire the skills you mentioned doing other activities then it doesn’t mean learning music is worthless just means music doesn’t hold a special ability to do it relative to certain other activities.
I started playing the guitar when I was sixteen. My good friend from high school who knew the start of a single ballad but otherwise couldn't play got waaay more attention.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I was a proper nerd and he was built like a greek god.
Another benefit besides those you listed is teamwork. Playing together in a band, there is no way to "game the system". Everyone needs to learn their part to make the overall piece enjoyable. It proved to me at an early age that people can come together to create something greater than themselves.
From the original study: "-evidence indicates that engagement in music has no impact on people’s non-music cognitive skills".
My intuition says the evidence must not be comprehensive enough then.
> Playing together in a band, there is no way to "game the system". Everyone needs to learn their part to make the overall piece enjoyable.
Sure there is. I did it! Playing the bass meant very few fast parts like the other people (except for some nasty stuff Bach wrote because he hates bassists), and playing cymbals in marching band is way less effort than sousaphone or even a lightweight wind instrument.
Team work isn't really a cognitive skill. I agree it can help with team work but you don't necessarily need to play in a band to learn an instrument. Also, from the actual study, "music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior".
Personal anecdote. I worked in a top lab in my country’s university. My lab mates went off to work in top universities, as is the tradition. The lab employed two top students in the country by some specific metric. People working there had not a common background, upbringing or optimized method of work I could identify.
The only thing in common was that they all been taught to play instruments at a young age. We could have made an orchestra with the people working there.
The way I saw it at the time wasn’t that they were smarter, but that they had the understanding that practicing was important and that looking or sounding ridiculous at their first steps on anything was a usual process.
It wasn’t that they had developed intelligence, grit or perseverance, it was just another day for them of engaging something new, a paper or work item, and getting down to it.
Lack of self doubt and emotionless engagement in unfamiliar topics is probably more important than a few points higher in an IQ scale.
I've known many people who seem so much quicker to learn new things than me, but they can't seem to do anything serious because they immediately get fed up with how "bad" everything is.
Write a poem? The title sucks.
Write a song? It sounds like something else.
Write some code? This is ridiculously complicated and will take years.
IMO, someone who perseveres through the horribly difficult early stages of learning an instrument to the point where they can play something passably well is learning delayed gratification. The ability to delay gratification is directly correlated with success in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
That correlation disappears once you control for wealth. People go for instant gratification once they've learned that they can't trust that the thing they're delaying gratification for will ever come. People like to make fun of people who pick 100 dollars today over 200 dollars a month from now, but for the "other half", 200 dollars a month from now might as well be an eternity from now. And because wealth tends to be heritable and have other knock-on effects, what the study is really testing for is how trustworthy a child thinks adults are with offers, which is affected by whether that child is raised in the kind of environment where nothing can be guaranteed since an entire paycheck may have been entirely used up.
IIRC the ability to delay gratification as measured by the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is quite heavily correlated with "food security in the household" and whether you are involuntarily hungry as a kid. Half the correlation goes away in replication studies that controlled for social background.
Doesn't surprise me but the study also seems to be just trying to measure academic achievement.
I mean sure, I'm incredibly skeptical of "baby Mozart" approaches to music. Certainly starting young and practicing early goes a long way towards being successful in anything. Discipline in any field builds discipline towards others.
We can go on and on about the mathematical nature of music but I would argue it's easier for people to do it by not thinking about those things and being in touch with how it feels.
I'm kind of bothered that anything to do with IQ these days is pursued by researchers or is given a fair shake by our dear readers at Hacker News.
Stop trying to max your kids stats. It's incredibly dehumanizing. I get that we all want children to have the best opportunities, but maybe it'd be a more equitable situation if we stopped reducing ourselves to a numbers game.
Maybe they'll be smarter when they learn to do things they feel passionate about and not conditioned to perform like a trained monkey. We already have enough performative identity for careerism in high school kids. Maybe intelligence and success comes from knowing yourself, and not from being told to do things because you get points?
Sorry parents! An essential part of culture and discipline of art and pleasure might not be inherently advantageous to your child's ability to fill out tests so while you're at it make sure they never do anything for themselves beyond the sole purpose of getting in somewhere just so they can realize they don't know who they are!
Edit: Also the use of "put down the banjo". Let's talk about that. This is a study done in Japan and the UK. Are they even playing the banjo? Nothing wrong with the banjo, banjo's great. But specifically going with the banjo as their title and image lends itself to a specific tone for some readers. Not exactly what some people would consider "intellectual" music for vague reasons in class and race perhaps. I'm detecting a bias here against the "utility" of folk music. I wish they'd link the actual paper. Did the researchers give a bunch of banjos as part of a controlled study? I'm so sure a lot of well-to-do parents in Tokyo and London are feeling burned by having to keep up with the competitive nature among children in banjo culture.
My kid is playing Tchaikovski on the piano at this very moment. (Well, a for-beginners version of one of his themes, but still.) She's happy playing it, I'm happy hearing it. If nobody gets any smarter, who cares? We both just got happier. Ars gratia artis.
>Stop trying to max your kids stats. It's incredibly dehumanizing. I get that we all want children to have the best opportunities, but maybe it'd be a more equitable situation if we stopped reducing ourselves to a numbers game.
Sadly, in many respects, the only way to have a child who is at the top echelons is to treat them like a character in a lifelong RPG who needs to be constantly trained and optimized for such a purpose.
It's not just sports either. Political & business dynasties exhibit this behavior, where a child's entire life is mapped out from years 0 to 22.
Yeah, banjos have high association with hillbilly which in turn doesn't exactly invoke high intellectualism.
As a person who learned some basic music growing up, I like to think I appreciate music more than I would otherwise. That to me is the life win.
And I am utterly awed by a banjo player in full rock out mode!
I mean, Deliverance movie is one of the most well known examples that popularised the stereotypes mentioned above.
It practically defined for most people the "da-da-dingdang-dingdang-dingdang-dung" series of notes people think of with a banjo. But even in this most contrived example, damn if it doesn't get going full amazeballs after 2:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsC4kf6x_Q0
I have a similar view. The only thing that holds me back from chucking it out in total is the research showing a bunch of better life outcomes correlated with IQ.
I'm open to being set straight on this point but my understanding is that research is largely apart and of a better quality than the more race bating stuff of 'The Bell Curve' crowd.
Edit: Full disclosure, I am really shooting from the hip here so please go easy. This is an issue I've bumped into a couple times and have never gone super in-depth on.
There's something I've read about IQ where the correlation you speak of only applies to the, say, lower half of the range. I.e. someone with an IQ of 90 will do better in life than one with an IQ of 75, but you won't find a significant difference when comparing 110 and 125.
So basically IQ "works" in the lower range, and this shows through as a weaker correlation across the entire range, even though it is meaningless in the upper range.
This would then make sense too -- in the low end, IQ is affected by things like malnutrition, lead poisoning, and the like, which happen to people who live in areas where everyone are having worse life outcomes, but not because of their IQ.
I wish I had a reference for this hypothesis but I lost it. if someone does please hit me up.
> but you won't find a significant difference when comparing 110 and 125.
IQ is the measurement of how capable you are at abstract learning. So a lower IQ will lock you out of certain jobs, at least on merit alone. Like you won't be a university math professor with a 110 IQ, but you'd probably be a fine nurse. A 75 IQ locks you out of basically any job. I believe the military found that ~83 is the lowest IQ that is trainable for the most rudimentary job.
But having a high IQ is in-and-of-itself, not a guarantee of success, because socio-economic factors can also lock you out of certain jobs. 100 years ago, being a woman was enough to prevent you from being a university professor, regardless of your IQ. And even today, you still have to be born in the right country to the right parents to have the chance to be a doctor or something.
However, there is a pretty big difference between a 110IQ and a 125. That's a 1.5 standard deviation improvement. That's like comparing an American man who is 6'1 to one who is 6'6.
I'm aware there's a big difference in IQ test performance between 110 and 125. What I'm asking is if this IQ test performance truly translates to real life, the way the difference between 75 and 90 does.
~125 eases entry into well-paid middle class jobs. Over 140 people start to seem weird by median standards. Over 160 they can seem very weird indeed, and are likely to become isolated without a compatible environment. So they're just as likely to fail spectacularly as to become innovative successes.
If you test a population, regardless of the test, certain people will always do better on average. So IQ is real. Out of all the studies done in the social sciences, IQ is by far the most conclusive.
But the other half of the story is the myth of the genius. The idea that intelligence provides all the answers. It does not. Terence Tao, a child prodigy with an IQ of 230 (apparently), would know. [1]
Talking faster is like running faster. If you're a stand-up comedian or chasing a purse snatcher, you'll have an advantage. But neither would make life any easier unless you deliberately reinforce your talents with hard work and pursue paths where you maintain an advantage.
The world seems to be built around normal folk. Being average isn't that bad. Of course, now we must define average. No one is truly average. We're all over the place.
The current name implies it is a measure of a fairly poorly defined thing, general intelligence. So yes, I think changing the name would be a good idea.
Of course there is a reason when neurologists do tests for cognitive decline or deficiency they use a range of tests, IQ being only one of several employed.
Chess grandmasters don't make great mathematicians. Similarly, great warriors may not become great scientists. I don't see a lot of people making jumps from one technical field into another. They make a jump from one technical field to a general field, like politics or Venture capital.
As a child who was tracked into gifted classes since elementary school, I vividly remember whole lessons dedicated to strategically taking standardized tests.
An example of a tricky question we learned to answer correctly: "1. Big is to bigger as little is to ____" is "A. tiny," not "B. big", because the question is looking at changes in intensity, not just increasing size.
We were also taught general test-taking strategies like budgeting time for an entire test, making an educated guess on, or skipping & returning to, tricky questions, and so forth. Getting explicitly taught these skills made me perform better on standardized tests. And families like mine, with the socio-economic resources to get their kids taught these skills, will do better on standardized tests--including IQ tests--as a result.
I remember during tests I'd get stuck at the hardest problems and stubbornly solve them only to run out of time on the easy questions and haphazardly answer them until the "pen up" was announced. At some point a teacher taught us how to maximize our scores resembling the strategy you mention and yes, it did help. We weren't smarter by any means, but had a better strategy to taking tests.
At least around here it seems people are allowed to take the Mensa test multiple times.
I never took the official one but I understand a lot of effort goes into constructing test sets that doesn't benefit from cramming but (except for getting used to the format, which you can do online) only on raw "processing power".
I'm not a scientists or a psychiatrist so take my word for just that: my understanding.
Also I note that from what I hear on HN it seems to be that in USA IQ tests contain both spelling and history questions which - in my ears sounds like something very different from a raw IQ test.
There are lots of tests out there that all correlate with general mental ability. Some of these, like mental rotation tests, benefit a lot from practice. Some of them, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, don't. The tests used in modern IQ tests are the ones where practice don't give much benefit.
Everyone does better at IQ tests if they repeatedly practice IQ tests. A lot of those rely on you being fast at identifying a repeating pattern but there's only a finite amount of them. You can learn a few of the complex ones that are harder for you and bruteforce a sequence into fitting it, and anyone can do that.
Here's an interesting randomized controlled study that shows nominal improvements when retaking the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV after 3 months and 6 months. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/13854046.2012.659219 There's a long discussion of how significant, if at all, those improvements were, which I only quickly glanced over. Apparently practice effects are well established, at least in principle, and there are some well known analytical and examination methods (albeit contended--part of the discussion compares and contrasts them) that attempt to correct for them.
People in this thread talk alot about gaming multiple-choice tests, but when I was given the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children at age 11 I mostly remember alot of pictorial and physical work (puzzles, blocks), mental arithmetic (e.g. 2, 3, 4+ digit sums), verbal memorization, and other visual and oral interaction, not much written material. And it was administered by a developmental psychologist in a 1:1 setting. I have no doubt such an examination might be susceptible to practice effects, but I'd be surprised if it were as significant as for common written examinations. In the county (state?) I went to school the gifted programs required a formal Wechsler or Stanford-Binet exam, which I gather was a far more common requirement than today. Perhaps that's too expensive of a gateway when you have legions of parents knocking down the door to get their child tested for specialized programs, or when concerned about bias--test every kid, rather than relying on teachers identifying a small number of children for additional screening and examination.
The simplest way to 'game' multiple choice based forms of IQ test is to guess the multiple choice options when you don't actually know the answer. This isn't likely to allow you to fake genius, but will boost your score relative to a majority who don't attempt all questions unless there's a very well-designed negative marking scheme.
Willingness to guess answers to ensure the whole test is completed probably is associated with many of the success outcomes associated with higher IQ scores, but it isn't exactly what most people would consider to be intelligence.
Because the data strongly suggests that racial differences in general intelligence exist and exist due to genetic differences between populations. This idea makes certain people almost foam at the mouth (I've witnessed this personally and I'm only barely exaggerating).
Stephen Hsu, former VP of research at MSU for example was recently "canceled" from his job because he stated - in a very milquetoast and reasonable way - that even though he's aware that this kind of thing has been used to oppress people in the past, studies (specifically genome wide association studies) suggest that racial differences in intelligence are real and largely due to underlying genetic differences and not just socio-economic factors.
The genetic differences could be down to socio-economic factors though, such as some of your ancestors having been slaves and restricted in how they could choose a partner.
Not really. It works on the timescale that specific causes are affecting the genepool. Europeans with below average immune systems were removed from the gene pool virtually overnight by the black death. Native Americans famously never had the 'benefit' of this event.
Similarly, there was an enormous selective pressure on Black slaves in the Americas, so it's certainly possible some effects took only a generation to be reflected in the gene pool.
However, when it comes to intelligence, no strong evidence exists saying it is genetically predetermined. Culture and rolemodel of parents are far greater determinants, implying selective pressure is unlikely to affect the general intelligence of a subgroup.
I'm thinking that racism in root is the belief of superiority of one race over another. In the past, tests were designed in ways that (perhaps unintentionally) disadvantaged people of color (for example tests included [white] cultural knowledge). While better tests have been developed, if in the end they show that (even if only on average) there is a minor difference in test scores between whites and blacks, racists will point to it as definitive proof (with no care about the tests' external validity).
Can you please give an example of this supposed cultural knowledge? In particular one that PoC raised in the same country and having the same education would supposedly have a disadvantage in?
My memory of the claims I came across during my time in Educational Psychology Ph.D.: tests in the distant past (early 1900s) were often culturally biased (even if unintentionally). I couldn't quickly find examples, but the gist is language or customs more available to rich white kids than otherwise (think playing golf, polo, etc).
One quick post I came across when looking just now is about "oarsman" and "regatta", words more-likely to be familiar to rich white kids than otherwise:
The complaint about "oarsman" and "regatta" is nonsense.
Supposedly it was racist. Supposedly the white kids are all out doing yacht races, so they alone would know the vocabulary.
That is ridiculous. The portion of the population of white kids that go yachting is minuscule. Practically all white kids don't even know a person who does that. Practically all white kids have never even been on a yacht.
The question was fair. It, and others like it, are a test of reading. If you read well and have read a large variety of books, you'll know the words. The whole point of the test is to see if a student has that sort of college-capable ability (Can you read very well?) so of course the question belongs on the test.
The same goes for polo. Nobody does that. The same is nearly true for golf, and I think the desire to watch Tiger Woods might flip any advantage toward the black kids.
Don't focus on whether it's racist or not - that's not the point. The point is that it is easy for test makers who are not cognizant of culture to slip in questions that to some degree are easier to answer if you have relevant knowledg ef a particular culture.
In my Ph.D. studies in Educational Psychology we were made aware of cultural bias. More than a hundred years ago, when people made tests to assess "intelligence" they may have not been so careful as we try to be now.
Are you sincerely willing to claim that it's impossible to create a test that doesn't make it easier for some subset of the population to outperform another?
It's desirable to create a test with cultural bias. College has a culture. Remember, the test is about the ability to do well in college. Awareness of the cultural expectations will increase the chance of success in college.
If a student couldn't be bothered to learn about the culture, he isn't a good fit.
That said, the questions really are about reading. If you read lots of books, not counting the ones for little kids, you'll have no problem with the questions.
Those people practically don't exist, so who cares? They are a rounding error, if that.
It is desirable to maintain a college culture that is biased towards people who read about lots of different things, including yachts. Reading is good.
The choice of reading material matters. I don't count "The Cat In The Hat" and "Teen Magazine" the same as "The Grapes of Wrath", "Hamlet", "The Scarlet Letter", and "As I Lay Dying".
The post you're responding to may have been alluding to the controversy around the book "The Bell Curve" and follow-on discussion, where the questions of race and intelligence became a real hot button.
Most of our attempts to quantify intelligence have shown a correlation with race. That's evidence of something- either bad tests with cultural bias, or differences in intelligence between races.
I think most people recognize that the latter idea would be really bad for society, and thus requires a pretty high bar of evidence to consider, and IQ tests are far from good enough evidence.
A link to the referenced journal article "Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis" published in Memory and Cognition [0].
I have a subjective and still esoteric(be warned) theory about attention span.
As someone who have learned to play an instrument at my early teens, i've learned that to be actually good at something, you need to learn to deal with the primary discomfort feeling.
You are learning to fighting your natural 'cavemen nature', the more primitive parts of your brain that are more inclined to satisfying immediate pleasures.
As i've said, is a subjetive observation, but in my experience at least, people that tend to have lower quality results in what they do, apparently have lower 'attention spans'.
Their effort to concentrate into something is faster, and if you see a puppy dog, or a cat, or even a human baby, you can see they are distracted easily, jumping from one subject to another very fast.
Now if we think about humans that we regard the most, like Newton, Beethoven, Einstein, Curie, Rodin, etc..
The research or the product of their labor require a very big attention span, as in, they need to meditate over long periods of time on the same subject.
Now, getting back to the point, i've learned that things like learning a musical instrument, programming, learning some math, or reading classics, helped me into acquiring long attention spans, resulting in a improvement on the quality of my thoughts, ideas and products of the thinking process.
Maybe just learning music alone wont prove anything, but i bet that if you mix the right kind of activities, you can have at least, a starting point to sophisticated human beings.
My parents (who have both never played an instrument in their lives) signed me up for piano lessons when I was a child. I'd regularly be sent home with homework that I didn't know how to complete, no one taught me how to practice, and I'd frequently show up to lessons without any idea of what I was doing. I'm sure my parents paid a hefty fee, but I got zero value out of the experience.
As an adult, I revisited the piano, and learned more by myself over several weeks than I ever did going to lessons as a child. The experience taught me how to practice better, and it gave me a stronger intuition for how the brain learns.
The mistake my parents made was thinking that all the learning happens at the music lesson. That simply attending classes was enough to make me a better musician and a smarter child. I wonder how many other parents out there are making that same mistake right now.
When I first started lessons (as an adult) I too thought learning only happened at the lesson, I thought it was enough to pay and turn up, in fact I was so bad/lazy I was going to get dropped as a student.
But with constant daily practice now I'm not bad.
Regardless of 'studies' like this, learning music is incredibly beneficial in so many different ways and every child should have the opportunity.
> music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem ... [though] any enticing and empowering activity may improve children’s well-being
I would say those who study music (classical) at young age come from quite wealthy families, which mean easier access to resources, e.g., books, good schools, dedicated teachers, etc which could eventually lead to better iq test results.
Piano helped me incredibly as an emotional outlet, I wasn't good and can't really play anything without music, but it gave me a tool for cathartic expression.
That might have helped with school studies and such?
I played piano also, but only because my parents prodded me to (not forced, but essentially told me I ought to do and hired a teacher so I'd have to show progress at weekly intervals).
I didn't like it at all. To this day I still have an adversity to touching a physical instrument because of the memories I had of being 12, trying to challenge myself to playing a piece I liked and completely failing to reach a competent level, because I actually didn't care enough about piano as opposed to spending my time on transient time-wasters like television shows about video games, and I knew that I didn't care enough to get good, but I was encouraged to challenge myself anyways, and then I felt inferior because of seeing all the people the same age or younger around me that handled pieces many times more difficult with ease.
I hated being told that I did great by everyone after a recital where I ended up pausing in silence for an entire minute, because I knew they were only trying to keep my mood from deteriorating afterwards and because I personally knew from the heart that I did not do anything resembling "great."
Then I joined wind ensemble in high school.
As a result I can't listen to classical music without anxiety bubbling up any longer because of the ingrained memories of being pushed to be better than other people and being compelled to get into regional division X and not realizing that as someone without a purposeful devotion to music all of that was hopeless to accomplish from the start, such that the disappointment in my lack of abilities that followed was inevitable.
Sounds like the same argument someone linked to chess - that playing chess doesn’t make one smarter. Funny thing is, do you know what has a direct influence on neuron growth? Lifting weights, running, exercise. Not saying we have it all wrong, but I would question every sensational article that’s out there.
This. Learning music definitely makes children smarter at playing music, which is beneficial to anyone that might enjoy hearing their music or performing with them, and definitely the bit that ought to matter to the kids themselves if they're taking music lessons.
If you're learning/teaching music to get better at things you care about more than music, you've got the wrong idea...
People have such weird attitudes to IQ. Either denial of it's significance or hope to improve it by applying the right life experiences. It all seems based around the fear of the possibility that some of us really are born inferior and doomed to a worse life than others.
But we are. By far the easiest way to improve a child's IQ is to select parents with high IQ. But nobody wants to deselect themselves so wanting a high IQ child goes against the instinct of wanting to reproduce for most people and they're stuck in a cognitive dissonance.
We can reduce it through neglect and trauma but there's no known lasting way to enhance it beyond the natural limit each person is born with.
How about just accept that we're not all born equal? Nobody worries that a dog is less intelligent than a person but we still have pet dogs and happily accept their limitations.
I feel reminded of "gym science" when it comes to a lot of parental development strategies for children. Everyone does it so there must be something to it. If controlled studies can't replicate any effects it does not appear to bother parents much.
Why is it so hard to accept that domain transfer does not exist. If kids learn chess for a few years, they won't be better at mathematics. After five years of practicing Violin kids don't find learning a foreign language easier. Adding insult to injury, learning Latin (like many Europeans still do) contrary to common sense does not improve scholastic results of students when learning other languages.
Some times it's not about domain transfer. It's about learning how to learn, how to accomplish goals, how to manage time, and how to focus.
Focusing on specific, easily-disproven knowledge transfer questions is missing the point. A child who has a decade of experience in structured practice, focus, and learning is going to be better equipped to learn future topics than a child who doesn't have similar levels of experience pursuing goals and achieving academic accomplishments.
Why is it so hard to accept that domain transfer does not exist. If kids learn chess for a few years, they won't be better at mathematics.
That seems like the wrong way to look at it. I taught my son chess and music, not because I wanted him to be smart. But because I want him to have fun. He was already smart. I also taught him many other things of different types, games and sports, most of them what I find fun, some of them he liked, some he didn't.
Are chess and music useless? I don't think so. There are a handful of lessons to learn there that are useful for other domains. Is there no other way to learn them? Probably there are, but it's way easier to learn them as part of a fun activity than sitting in a class.
> Why is it so hard to accept that domain transfer does not exist.
I think, because, that's simply not true. The question is really "to what extent does domain transfer exist, and how can we exploit it?"
> If kids learn chess for a few years, they won't be better at mathematics. After five years of practicing Violin kids don't find learning a foreign language easier.
If kids spend several years on intentional practice of chess or violin, they're also practicing discipline. Compared to kids who spend these years unfocused, I'm guessing this group will have an easier time learning math or French simply because they have better learning habits.
Ok, I agree, but is a kid who spent several years on intentional chess practice better academically then a kid who spent several years on intentional math practice?
I think that depends on a lot of factors, and I wouldn't want to judge one way or the other.
Perhaps a kid who spends several years in chess clubs and really enjoys it is better off academically+socially than a kid forced by their parents to compete in math tournaments against their will, simply because the latter will have better emotional maturity and a support system to help them succeed later in life.
Speaking to my own experiences, I can say my parents encouraged me to hyper-optimize for grades and academics, but that I missed out on a lot of other, irreplaceable experiences growing up. My parents taught me to look down on people who choose sports, theater, etc. over academics, but as an adult I see just how formative those activities can be when it comes to soft skills like teamwork and leadership.
> Adding insult to injury, learning Latin (like many Europeans still do) contrary to common sense does not improve scholastic results of students when learning other languages.
I find that studying Romance languages has helped with understanding literary work written in English, especially when it comes to the etymology of words in English. Would have figured that studying Latin would have paid dividends at least in those respects.
"Smart" is one of those nebulous things, until people give it a too-narrow definition like IQ. It's important to acknowledge that there are many kinds of intelligence, not all of which are pure logic or knowledge-gathering.
I think it's a poor definition. I don't like change. I don't like going to new places, I like my routine. Change makes me uncomfortable and I'm slow to accept it. I like my usual meals and sleeping in my own bed. Does that make me unintelligent? Or does "change" need to be better defined?
Adapting and liking are two different things. Adapting to change by devising ways to keep your routine needs a minimum of intelligence. Though I make no statement on any relative or absolute scale.
That's why I'd like the definition to be refined. There's also displays of intelligence that have nothing to do with change - being able to do complex math in your head would indicate you're intelligent, but has nothing to do with change.
I also find that far to often people think another person is not smart because they don't measure up to themselves in the same intelligence categories. I always try to describe this as the categories intelligence being disturbed across sphere where each category is a tangential line. Due to ones own perspective, another may not actually look intelligent because they're orthogonal to ones own, and they are then perceived to be "stupid".
You can't change IQ (You probably can, but it's not simple)
But you can change the second biggest life impacting testable factor in people, conscientiousness.
Seems like learning music is a good way to learn conscientiousness.
This article is really bad advice.
But it does raise the question do people in the United Arab Emirates think most Americans play the banjo or are they self aware about the ironic-ness, or does the 44C weather temperate that day mean it's just to hot for them to think much about the article they wrote.
The study doesn't conclude that learning music is useless. They focused only on generalized cognitive measures.
Dedicated learning of any activity over time, music or otherwise, likely has long-term benefits in terms of learning how to focus, how to achieve goals, how to manage time, and other structural improvements.
The authors even cite other studies showing that learning music can improve well-being, improve self-esteem, encourage prosocial behavior, and even lead to more narrow cognitive improvements in math fields that might not necessarily appear on generalized IQ tests.
> First, music may be beneficial for non-cognitive constructs in children such as prosocial behavior and self-esteem (e.g., Aleman et al., 2017). These possible advantages are not likely to be specific to music, though. In fact, any enticing and empowering activity may improve children’s well-being. Second, elements of music instruction (e.g., arithmetical music notation) could be used to facilitate learning in other disciplines such as arithmetic (Azaryahu, Courey, Elkoshi, & Adi-Japha, 2019; Courey, Balogh, Siker, & Paik, 2012; Ribeiro & Santos, 2017).
Sounds a bit counter-intuitive to me. I always thought the brains of musicians are much more analytical as playing music requires a lot of understanding and (usually) good memory. Classical and jazz musicians typically remember a lot of music in their heads, which require tremendous effort and a rigid process.
Anyway, even if learning music doesn't raise IQ, there are so many benefits. Other than having an enjoyable hobby, I always thought the process of learning classical music properly is very similar to programming (or other aspects in life). You start from small segments, practice until you're good enough to move on, repeat, and slowly put larger pieces together. You then listen to your playing, find out what's unsatisfying, then repeat the process until you've mastered the piece. After learning a piece, you also need to maintain it from time to time if you still want to play it well. This kind of learning process cannot be shown in an IQ test, but is beneficial to a child's development if adopted early.
Where did the idea come from that studying music was meant to make kids smart? I don't see the presumed connection. Not everything we learn is meant to increase our cognitive abilities. Schools teach music to product more well-rounded individuals, not to make them smarter. Schools are something more than IQ factories.
Not everything needs an objective quantifiable measure of academic performance to make it a good thing people should know.
Even if Music may not have an affect on academic performance or cognitive skills, it's still a fun skill. Most primary school programs introduce kids to basic music reading, singing, and simple instruments. Some kids like it and enroll in more music programs. Some kids say it's not for them and do other things. But it's nice to give kids that introduction and those options.
If you like music, it can provides decades of enjoyment to learn how to play. It doesn't make you better than people who just listen to and appreciate music, but it can enhance your happiness to be able to pick and and fiddle around with your fiddle or harmonic or guitar every once in a while.
What happened to learning just for the sake of learning and enjoyment?
I see learning to play an instrument as a self improvement exercise. It's a process. There's a lag between our hands and our ears. It's easy for the ears to know a "good" song. It's hard for the hands to play a good song. To play a song well is to bridge the skill gap of the hands. When you can play a song well, you "complete" a task. The process improves our skills and our cognition. We can recognize "good" from "not so good". Overtime, it can improve our baloney detector. It improves self awareness. You know when you suck. And you know if you work diligently, you'd be able to improve. I think it's a valuable skill. It's more important than high SAT or IQ scores.
I played music for several years when in school, starting in Junior High. Didn't read the article, but the title inspired me to make a comment.
I think the skills you learn in music performance are extremely valuable. Sure, there are plenty of people who "learn music" but don't apply themselves like with any discipline.
This is only anecdata, but if I had to guess I'd say there is a correlation between my ability to toggle into and out of a "flow" state when working as a programmer and my past life when I spent a great deal of time learning music.
Sure everyone's experience will vary, but I found that "flow" is a phenomenon I regularly experienced when performing music once I reached a certain skill level.
Some of the best programmers I know were music majors turned programmer. There's something about the creativity or learning of another abstract "language" that music brings that seems to tie well into programming.
"The fact that skills learned by training do not transfer across different domains seems to be a universal in human cognition. In other words, you get better, at best, at what you train in – which may just sound just like good old fashioned common sense."
I think learning music is very effective for self-improvement for other reasons, it's a very effective exercise in reconciling feelings with reality. Do you love a particular section of the music in your head and it's really hard? You just have to keep wrestling with reality to learn it. Are you trying to express a certain feeling with music? You have to get skilled enough at the music/instrument to be able to express it. I don't know if that means it actually helps teach emotional self-regulation in general, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Learning music might not may a child smarter, but it may teach the child "metaskills" like character which cannot be learned directly. Here's an (snipped) quote from something I read a while ago: [1]
"When a student learns piano, all Americans can see is that the student is now equipped with the skill to play the piano. Under this view, unless the student can put that skill into use in the future somehow, the time spent on acquiring that skill is wasted. This is a deeply mistaken attitude, and the ever-smart tiger cub Sophia Rubenfeld-Chua has the perfect answer showing the flaw of that attitude:
''I’m never going to be a professional pianist, but the piano has given me confidence that totally shapes my life. I feel that if I work hard enough, I can do anything. I know I can focus on a given task for hours at a time. And on horrible days when I’m lost and a mess, I can say to myself, "I’m good at something that I really, really love." I want my kids to have that confidence – confidence rooted in something concrete, not just "aww everyone’s a winner!!!" confidence, because in your heart you never believe that.''
The point of learning the piano is NOT about acquiring the skill of playing the piano so that the student can earn a living as a pianist. It is about building the character of the person. Here is the thing about character -- you can't build it by explicitly setting out to build it. Character is not a skill like tying your shoelaces. If it must be put in terms of "skill", character is a "meta-skill" -- a foundational human skill that is necessary to perfect any number of mechanical skills. And the only way to develop this meta-skill is to develop at least one highly sophisticated mechanical skill, such that the student may acquire the meta-skill in the course of building the mechanical skill.
... it is about acquiring genuine confidence and iron discipline. With such confidence and discipline, she can move on and do anything she wants in her life because there is no task in life in which confidence and discipline hinder success."
Music is one of the most enjoyable ways to create. I don’t really care what my kids do specifically; I just want them to learn how to experiment and create and have fun and never stop playing.
I'm aware that this is the case for most people's music 'education'. Sometimes I think the same for school-taught programmers. Actually I have a hard time coming up with any kind of education that has enabled more than stifled creation.
Long ago I had just one music lesson and then bailed forever; it was terribly rote, but much later as an adult I did something that changed how I saw it. My brother got a keyboard for Christmas, and nobody knew how to play, so I just started practicing the finger placements for the 'Axis of Awesome' chords, and about 4 hours later I was competently entertaining his kids with songs I was making up as I was going along. That was an incredible feeling of weightlessness and thoughtlessness, like some spirit I've never known was playing through me.
A potential issue with music study is that only a certain fraction of kids who are given music lessons actually thrive at it. Many people remember being forced to take lessons and hating it. Others failed on multiple attempts until it finally "took."
So for this reason, I'm not sure that music training is a single "thing" that can be analyzed without looking into how each person experienced it.
Another possible study is to measure successful musical training by whether someone is actually a musician or not.
I would argue that studying music (especially music theory) at a young age has helped me tremendously as a programmer in my old age.
I am writing an algo trading bot right now and I make a habit of reading the entire codebase fairly regularly to make sure I understand exactly what is going on at all times while the bot is running.
Which seems similar to reading and understanding a sheet (or a book) of music before you play it.
There must be some correlation there although I have no hard evidence.
It could simply be that growing up in an environment where being taught music is possible (with tutors and teachers and instruments all paid for) is correlated with doing better in school. If you're growing up with parents who struggle to pay the bills, who can't afford the time or money to teach their kids music, odds are those kids are struggling in other parts of their life too.
You don't need to be rich or even middle class to play music, but you're much more likely to get a flute and lessons on how to play it if you've got parents who aren't dirt fucking poor and/or totally uninterested in your education. Thus there's obvious an association between music lessons and family background that needs controlling for.
As for MJ, he might not have been born rich, but nobody would say his musical accomplishments weren't linked to decisions his parents made for him.
Learning music wont make your child smart, but it will come in handy when your child grows up to be viceroy of a small overseas colony and must function as a member of aristocratic society.
This has been known for so long that the “Mozart effect” is routinely used as an example of bad science in undergrad psychological research methods courses.
Note that since we are talking about averages, it could be true both that music training on average doesn't have a visible effect, but that some specific ways of doing music training are helpful and others are harmful. There are a wide variety of ways to teach music and a broad study won't figure out which ones are better or worse.
Or it could be the musical training is effective for a certain people but detrimental for others, and the average would be near zero.
However, there's a limit to how much research you can do. Chasing after effects on subsets of the population has problems too. https://xkcd.com/882/
I don’t care what a study says in my case: chess makes you smarter. It makes you better able to concentrate, visualize, and plan. Not sure if it helps you discover anagrams or find number patterns on an iq test but who cares
You don't really need a PhD in psychology to figure out that any activity that involves putting effort over long periods of time will yield _some_ sort of result. Whether that actually translates directly to hyper-specific measurements (e.g. school math grades) as opposed to only "soft" long-term changes in behavior (e.g. developing an interest in the relationship between music and math, leading to e.g. an interest in software engineering over medicine, or an increased interest in arts, or whatever) seems to me like asking the wrong question.
Both music and intelligence are incredibly multidimensional. Trying to narrowly define a supposed correlation between two very narrow aspects of both might be a disservice to the idea of the development of a well rounded individual. I feel that many people take these sorts of soundbite titles to heart as if they were little life hacks to "get ahead", rather than thinking about life as a holistic experience.