P R E S S   R E L E A S E

        Encouraging your kid to practise music may have a positive effect on memory that you would have never thought of. A recent study published in the 12 November issue of Nature, one of the most prominent academic journals in science, reported that music training in childhood might boost one's verbal memory.  This study was conducted by Professor Agnes S. Chan and her students Yim-Chi Ho and Mei-Chun Cheung at the Department of Psychology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

        Sixty college students from the Chinese University, of whom 30 had had at least six years of training with a western musical instrument before the age of 12, and 30 had received no music training, were recruited in the study. The researchers assessed the verbal memory of each subject by the number of Chinese words the subjects could recall in a list-learning task in which a 16-word list was presented orally three times to each subject. Their visual memory was also assessed by the Benton Visual Retention Test and the Rey-Osterreith Complex Figure Test.  These two tests required the subjects to draw some newly seen figures.   

        The results show that students with music training remember significantly more words than those without any music training, and the difference is around 17%.  On the other hand, no significant difference was found between the two groups in their performance on the visual memory tests were not significantly different.

        Previous neuropsychological studies have shown that the left planum temporal region of the brain is larger in musicians than in non-musicians. Professor Chan speculated that the cognitive function mediated by the left temporal area thus might have been better developed than those in the right side. Since verbal memory is mediated mainly by the left temporal lobe, adults with music training may therefore be found to have a better verbal memory than adults without such training.  

        Professor Chan advocates that verbal memory is a very important factor in our learning process. The better verbal memory one have, the more one can learn. Thus, one way to improve the students' academic performance maybe to increase their verbal memory. While most memory-training programmes are based on relatively boring mnemonic techniques, the present study sheds light on the employment of an alternative way of thinking about improving one's memory.  Music training has a major advantage over other techniques in a way that it is more enjoyable than the conventional mnemonic strategies training.

        Professor Chan, as a clinical neuropsychologist, expresses that this result provide a new way of thinking about cognitive intervention.  She hopes that this idea may eventually led to an effective intervention for improving the memory function of amnesic patients especially those with language impairment. Since music training requires little verbal skill, so it may be more suitable as a memory-training technique for patients with language difficulty.