Saturday, March 5, 2011

Why babies are smarter...

The following video is about the ground breaking revolution in brain research on babies. We have reached a critical turning point in the understanding of how children learn and how the early months and years are critical. In this video Patricia Kuhl points shows how babies learn a language and how as we get older it becomes more difficult.

Learning language and learning music by many experts has been described as almost identical and in fact many refer to music as a language. After all many of the elements are same. So we can only assume that babies who are exposed to music in the same way as language would gain a huge advantage. If as a baby your parents played jazz around the house the odds are you would have an ear for jazz. If your parents actually played music than we would assume the effect was even greater.

Many great musicians are the children of musicians. Among some of my own influences are Eddie Van Halen (whose middle name is actually Lodewijk which is derived from Ludwig Beethoven as Eddie's father was a successful clarinetist), Tommy Emmanuel whose mother was a lap steel guitarist, Santana whose father was a violinist and Mozart who was the son of one of Europe's leading music teachers. So if you are a parent or planning to be a parent than I am sure you will find this video fascinating.

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