Music makes you smarter (and other lies)

I've been on a rage bender lately in regards to irresponsible journalism so I want to apologize in advance if this seems somewhat far afield from my usual posts. That said, in a lot of ways, I think we should all be on rage benders about irresponsible journalism.  And I don't just mean Fox News and anti-vaxxers although they certainly represent the worst of the lot.

I'll start with a subject that's close to my heart.  The Washington Post published an article in January with the title "Music lessons spur emotional and behavioral growth in children, new study says."  Like a lot of musicians I would love for this claim to be true.  Those of us who have made a significant investment of time in the arts will jump at the chance to wax poetic about the benefits the arts have brought to our lives.  Good hard science to indicate that those benefits are not just for our souls but for our brains as well would go a long way toward ensuring that future generations have access to the same quality music education I did.  That said, this proof doesn't yet exist so far as I'm aware.

When I was a Freshman in college I mentioned to one of my professors that music makes you smarter as a matter of course.  I was then taken aback by what could be only described as an intellectual eye roll from her.  There isn't actually any proof that music makes you smarter (AKA the Mozart Effect).  The original study only consisted of 36 students and the results of that study were never replicated by other researchers in spite of multiple efforts to do so. 

Similarly, I question whether "Music lessons spur emotional and behavioral growth in children."  The study looked at brain scans of 232 children who played an instrument and determined that "Playing a musical instrument was associated with more rapid cortical thickness maturation within areas implicated in motor planning and coordination, visuospatial ability, and emotion and impulse regulation. However, given the quasi-experimental nature of this study, we cannot rule out the influence of confounding variables."

Why is the study quasi-experimental?
There are only 232 participants.
There was no control group.
They didn't account for 'confounding variables' such as the likelihood that those children who study musical instruments are also from relatively more wealthy families which could also effect brain development in a variety of ways.

Further study is needed.

At the end of the day I'm not too terribly torn up about a positive misrepresentation about music education in the news but I do think that consistent misreporting in regards to research of all kinds lends credence to those who distrust science entirely.  Why trust science when the media says it tells you one thing today and another tomorrow?  And this phenomenon is hardly rare.  In fact, it seems to me that its much more rare to read about a study in the news that IS based on good science.  This makes sense in a way.  Good science takes a long time and a lot of money.  Notable results are bound to be few and far between while preliminary results proliferate.  The professional standard for truth in journalism is in decline.  It's a perfect storm.

I don't really have a solution for all this except to say implore readers to dig just a little deeper before really believing and/or sharing this kind of news.  It should be easy to find basic information about the source or study online.  If it's not then whatever you just read is probably bullshit and better to be ignored.  I also think that this blog post makes some excellent points about 'What is a good study?'

Rage Bender Out