Can You Repeat That?

If you have a child, you already have experienced the fact that children want to read a book, hear a story, or watch a movie over and over and over and over again. Until you are going crazy and want to hide it. But why? Not why you want to hide it! I already know that answer. But why do children want repetition?

We expose our children to a variety of experiences – things to see, hear, taste, touch, smell, people, new ways of moving or thinking – and new neural connections are formed in their brains. But not all of these connections will remain intact. It is only through repetition (or “practice”) that the neural connections become strengthened enough for skills to form.

Children love repetition because that’s the way they learn and remember new information best. And once your child has learned something, repetition is enjoyed because now your child can anticipate what comes next. How much more actively does your child participate in story time when she knows the ending to all the sentences? And how hilarious and clever does he think he is when he “catches” you substituting the wrong words in a favorite book?

When she can now sing along to a piece of music, repeat finger plays or recite chants, she can move on from “remembering” the words and tune, to practice using her voice and vocabulary words, and even creating something new – like extra words to the song.

It is sheer joy for a child to know they have mastered something, whether it’s building a block tower or putting together a puzzle. The child will repeat that skill to in order to continue to feel that joy of mastery. For instance, once a child has learned to walk, there is usually this period of time when all they want to do is walk and walk. Sometimes it is hard to get a new walker to stop and sit still long enough to eat at lunchtime, so we might put a little plate of finger foods on a low table that he could graze on as he circled through the kitchen again and again and again. We could call this “dine and dash”.

When something is successfully learned, (the neural connections are firmly established), a child receives a great deal of satisfaction, and he thinks it is “fun”. He is then driven to learn skills or information that is more complex than before.

So, I hope that you’ll remember that you are helping your child’s brain to grow, when playing Track #9 on your Kindermusik CD for the 7,219th time in a row!

What does music do for you?

This is a distillation of “Why Music Moves Us” by Karen Schrock, Scientific American, July 15, 2009

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a person who hates music. Most of us have some music we love and some that gets on our nerves—I currently have a song I dislike that’s been stuck in my brain for days—but that’s another blog. Overall, human beings are inclined from birth to respond positively to music. What’s up with that?

From the moment of conception, our development has at least one consistent sound track, the rhythmic lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub of our mother’s heart beat. Our brains develop to that musak. Cutting edge brain research shows that brain systems used for language, emotion and movement respond to music. Music processing “hijacks” these systems and thus almost every area of our brain plays some part in our response to music.

Music & Emotion
Music activates many diverse brain circuits simultaneously, especially the limbic system, which is related to emotion. Research strongly indicates that music evokes similar mood and feeling across age, race, gender, cultural lines. For example, in one study a broad spectrum of people identified a song as happy, sad or scary.

Scientists concluded that music reliably conveys the intended emotion to all listeners. No other mode of communication has this power. Music has a unique and amazing ability to transcend most differences, including cognitive disabilities such as autism. One study revealed that autistic children, whose ability to pick up emotional cues in social settings was severely impaired, nonetheless were able to recognize feelings in music just the same as non-autistic children.

It follows that music also reliably creates a social bond across differences. In most cultures, music is a communal event and elicits not only an emotional response that is shared, but a physical one—dancing, clapping, swaying, marching. Motor regions of the brain such as the cerebellum, used for processing rhythm, are stimulated.

Neuropsychologist Robert Zattore said “I can see how rhythm and physical action would have mutual resonance in the nervous system. All sound is produced by movement. When you hear a sound it’s because something has moved.” The rhythm of song, Zattore says, creates a pattern that the brain can understand and then organize muscles to join in. Music making takes people communicating and cooperating. It’s a “social glue.”

In addition to the communal nature of music, music influences the physiological systems thereby making people feel something—more hyped-up, more calmed down, more sad or happy. A parent sings a lullaby to settle an anxious infant. Aerobics instructors choose upbeat music which really does get the blood pumping. In a study done with Alzheimer’s patients, agitation was significantly reduced when a CD of their favorite songs was consistently played for them.

Music appreciation seems to be hard-wired into our brains for our physical and social benefit and emotional enjoyment. Kindermusik is an environment which maximizes all these elements. Kids are exposed to a broad spectrum of music. They learn to copy and produce rhythm. They sing happy, fast songs and slow, sad songs. They develop a sense of community within their classes. Both parent and child come away feeling better! They take their music home with them. What’s not to like about that?