Why Musicking Makes You Smarter at Any Age

I am not going to tell you that playing music made Einstein a genius. That is the kind of claim that sounds good in a headline and collapses the moment you look at it. Plenty of people played violin in the twentieth century and did not develop the theory of relativity. Correlation is not cause. You already know that.

What I want to tell you is something different. Something more interesting. And something far more useful to you.

These people played because they knew, at some level they may not have been able to fully articulate, that it made them better. Not smarter in some vague general sense. Better at accessing what was already in them. The music was not decoration. It was operational.

Now there is a scientific framework that explains exactly why.