Playing a musical instrument makes you brainier

moxham123 · Post by **moxham123** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 2:37 pm

Playing a musical instrument makes you brainier

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... inier.html

MeYatch · Post by **MeYatch** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:35 pm

Experts said there is growing evidence that musicians have structurally and functionally different brains compared with non-musicians

does not mean "Playing a musical instrument makes you brainier"

I'm going to publish a totally badass paper called "Musicians don't know the difference between Correlation and Causation"

These totally bullshit studies are ruining the world.

What if you are totally tone deaf? Is banging on a piano a couple hours a day going to make you smarter? shit no. Its practically guarenteed that this is a textbook example reversing the cause and effect.

Flaw · Post by **Flaw** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:41 pm

MeYatch wrote:I'm going to publish a totally badass paper called "Musicians don't know the difference between Correlation and Causation"

These totally bullshit studies are ruining the world.

What if you are totally tone deaf? Is banging on a piano a couple hours a day going to make you smarter? shit no. Its practically guarenteed that this is a textbook example reversing the cause and effect.

x80

MeYatch · Post by **MeYatch** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 6:30 pm

What? This is not news, its making shit up.

The bulk of the article is doing shit improves cognitive function Then some journalist wraps it up in a pretty bow and sells it to whoever's buying.

I'm not saying playing music doesn't improve your cognitive function, but they have no way of proving it does either.

There is also basically no way to prove that people that are good at music, and willing to put the time into learning to play at least well enough to not kill themselves after practicing for months are not pre-disposed to performing better in certain tests.

bassist_25 · Post by **bassist_25** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 6:57 pm

MeYatch wrote:
The bulk of the article is doing shit improves cognitive function Then some journalist wraps it up in a pretty bow and sells it to whoever's buying.

These totally bullshit studies are ruining the world.

Be cautious of the research presented in a mainstream article. Science builds off of the synergy of multiple studies considered together. Find the orignal study on psychINFO. The study is most likely legimitimate; its findings were just misconstrued by a journalist who knows nothing about research. Take a strong look at the effect sizes and give some good consideration to the study's internal validity.

I'm not saying playing music doesn't improve your cognitive function, but they have no way of proving it does either.

And they never will...because science, particuarly social science, does not deal in "proving" or "disproving" anything. That's something that's drilled into the head of every potential scholar on his or her first day of Research Methods 101. Theories and hypthoses are confirmed or disconfirmed insofar as statistical significance indicates that the outcomes were not due to chance.

There is also basically no way to prove that people that are good at music, and willing to put the time into learning to play at least well enough to not kill themselves after practicing for months are not pre-disposed to performing better in certain tests.

Why not? You'd have to control for test/retest being a threat to internal validity (perhaps this could be controlled by using two tests with seperate items but strong concurrent validity), but you could gain a baseline performance by administering an IQ test. Then participants could be exposed to the independent variable (music), and then administered the dependent variable, which would be another test with concurrent validity with the original IQ test that measures pretty much the same thing. Depending on the time it would take someone to show a significant change after the exposure to the IV, it would still be possible to control for maturation and history threats to internal validity.

witchhunt · Post by **witchhunt** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 7:11 pm

bassist_25 wrote:legimitimate

Better go play your instrument some more.

MeYatch · Post by **MeYatch** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 7:35 pm

bassist_25 wrote: Be cautious of the research presented in a mainstream article. Science builds off of the synergy of multiple studies considered together. Find the orignal study on psychINFO. The study is most likely legimitimate; its findings were just misconstrued by a journalist who knows nothing about research. Take a strong look at the effect sizes and give some good consideration to the study's internal validity.

That's the gist of what I was saying.

The thing that pisses me off is that this kind of stuff gets reported as news, then people go spouting it off as fact.

Just for the record I do totally agree that music would improve cognitive function. I don't know if it improves it more so than another activity involving similar levels of concentration.

From the way the article was written it appeared to be a sample set of musicians. Which doesn't really prove much of anything.

Could be shoddy science or shoddy journalism, but its not even approaching fact.

Colton · Post by **Colton** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 7:52 pm

Whatever, my guitar made me into a fucking genius. I can almost count to 10 now.

Flaw · Post by **Flaw** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:37 pm

this is fact that someone who learns a instrument, not just play a instrument, learns notation, keys, pitches, and whatever else, has expanded his mind more then a kid playing x box. the article is put in the news so that a parent will read it and try and get their kid into music.

MeYatch · Post by **MeYatch** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:54 pm

Flaw wrote:this is fact that someone who learns a instrument, not just play a instrument, learns notation, keys, pitches, and whatever else, has expanded his mind more then a kid playing x box. the article is put in the news so that a parent will read it and try and get their kid into music.

It doesn't say that whatsoever. I can almost guarantee you that playing Xbox also increases your cognitive function. I don't know whether its more or less than playing an instrument, but neither does the reporter.

Flaw · Post by **Flaw** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 3:22 am

i wasn't basing my post off the article. i was basing it off that you implied learning an instrument won't make you smarter. how can you learn something and have it not benefit you in being smarter.

Colton · Post by **Colton** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 3:28 am

Flaw wrote: how can you learn something and have it not benefit you in being smarter.

I learned how to make water bongs once...

Flaw · Post by **Flaw** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 4:36 am

Colton wrote:
Flaw wrote: how can you learn something and have it not benefit you in being smarter.
I learned how to make water bongs once...

lol as soon as posted that i thought id better edit that but i couldn't take an opening like that away from someone on here.

bassist_25 · Post by **bassist_25** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 4:35 pm

MeYatch wrote:
The thing that pisses me off is that this kind of stuff gets reported as news, then people go spouting it off as fact.

Agreed. Unfortunately, most journalists aren't trained in research. They're not looking over F scores and analyzing the construct validity of a measure. They simply hear that Study X was performed and a certain result was found. That's then what gets published in the mainstream source. I don't know if that's due to igorance of how science actually works or is just sensationalism. However, in my experience, people are poor consumers of information, anyways. I recieved a call at work this past summer from a reporter in Hazelton, asking me my opinion on the economic situation's effect on labor disputes. I made sure I was clear with the facts and stuck to objective things like labor theory and the NLRA. However, I couldn't help but worry the rest of the day that there was going to be an article in a newspaper somewhere that said, "Paul says that there are less strikes due to the economic downturn."

Again, I'm not bashing on journalists with this post. I'm just saying that a lot of times, science, particuarly social science, is misrepresented in the mainstream media. Social sciences deal in variation; physical sciences deal in constants. It's easy to simply write that researchers found X causes Y. However, the big picture is never that simple. If it were, people wouldn't have entire scholarly careers studying how just a handful of variables interact.