What if music could help neurodivergent students focus, listen, and communicate more easily? Music learning strengthens how the brain processes sound, supports attention and memory, and helps students filter speech in noisy settings. For learners with ADHD, autism, or sensory challenges, it offers a structured, motivating way to build essential skills.

Some students don’t light up when the music soars—and it’s not about effort or attitude. Neuroscience is uncovering how individual brain wiring can shape emotional responses to music, including a rare condition called specific musical anhedonia. As educators, this challenges us to broaden our lens: what if joy in music doesn’t look the same for everyone?

Music isn’t just an artform—it’s a brain booster. This post explores how music primes the brain for learning by enhancing focus, memory, and emotional connection. For music teachers, it’s a reminder that every lesson is more than musical—it’s neurological.

This article delves into the transformative impact of music education, particularly for underserved students, and a strategic tool for addressing academic challenges, boosting attendance, language skills, and social integration.

You don’t have to be a musician to reap the benefits of music. Enjoying music activates a slew of brain regions, including areas involved in hearing, movement, reward, and emotion.

This study shows for the first time a causal role of dopamine in musical pleasure and motivation: enjoying a piece of music, deriving pleasure from it, wanting to listen to it again, being willing to spend money for it, strongly depend on the dopamine released in our synapses.

Possibly! This heavy duty article highlights the recent research which has found that music listening and performance has been found to influence how genes behave or regulate themselves. The first few sentences set the scene and we have done a translation for you.

Prof Schellenberg compared 114 articles about music training and brain development and then analysed the titles and abstracts for the inference of causational (one action causes another) findings and correlational (a connection between two things) findings.

Periodically the research community completes a systematic review, sometimes known as a literature review, of a given area of research.

Do you have similar musical tastes to your friends? How about your work colleagues? Do you think musical tastes tell us anything else about a person? This study thinks it might when it compared musical taste with political leaning.

Here is one hell of a tricky question – if your musical potential, meaning your likelihood of being successful at learning music (whatever that really means) could be measured, would you want to know?

In this recent study, drummers were researched because “Most people can only perform fine motor tasks with one hand and have problems playing different rhythms with both hands at the same time,” but, “Drummers can do things that are impossible for untrained people.”