Washington, DC, March 4, 2008 – Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a study three years in the making, is the result of research by cognitive neuroscientists from seven leading universities in the United States. In the Dana Consortium study, released today at a news conference at the Dana Foundation’s Washington, DC headquarters, researchers grappled with a fundamental question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter"
For the first time, coordinated, multi-university scientific research brings us closer to answering that question. Learning, Arts, and the Brain advances our understanding of the effects of music, dance, and drama education on other types of learning. Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas.
The research was led by Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. “A life-affirming dimension is opening up in neuroscience,” said Dr. Gazzaniga, “to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live. The consortium’s new findings and conceptual advances have clarified what now needs to be done.”
Participating researchers, using brain imaging studies and behavioral assessment, identified eight key points relevant to the interests of parents, students, educators, neuroscientists, and policy makers.
As several of the consortium members stressed at today’s news conference, much of their research was of a preliminary nature, yielding several tight correlations but not definitive causal relationships.
Although “there is still a lot of work to be done,” says Dr. Gazzaniga, the consortium’s research so far has clarified the way forward. “We now have further reasons to believe that training in the arts has positive benefits for more general cognitive mechanisms.”
Principal investigators, working with their colleagues, were:
1. How Arts Training Influences Cognition
Michael Posner, Ph.D.
University of Oregon
2. Musical Skill and Cognition
John Jonides, Ph.D.
University of Michigan
3. Effects of Music Instruction on Developing Cognitive Systems at the Foundations of Mathematics and Science
Elizabeth Spelke, Ph.D.
Harvard University
4. Training in the Arts, Reading, and Brain Imaging
Brian Wandell, Ph.D.
Stanford University
5. Dance and the Brain
Scott Grafton, M.D.
University of California at Santa Barbara
6. Developing and Implementing Neuroimaging Tools to Determine if Training in the Arts Impacts the Brain
Mark D’Esposito, M.D.
University of California, Berkeley
7. Arts Education, the Brain, and Language
Kevin Niall Dunbar, Ph.D.
University of Toronto at Scarborough
(Formerly at Dartmouth College)
8. Arts Education, the Brain, and Language
Laura-Ann Petitto, Ed.D.
University of Toronto at Scarborough
(Formerly at Dartmouth College)
9. Effects of Music Training on Brain and Cognitive Development in Under-Privileged 3- to 5-Year-Old Children: Preliminary Results
Helen Neville, Ph.D.
University of Oregon
The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropic organization with particular interests in neuroscience, immunology, and arts education.