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Do Music Lessons Really Make Children Smarter?

Undark

A recent analysis found that most research mischaracterizes the relationship between music and skills enhancement.

IN 2004, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science, titled “Music Lessons Enhance IQ.” The author, composer and University of Toronto Mississauga psychologist Glenn Schellenberg, had conducted an experiment with 144 children randomly assigned to four groups: one learned the keyboard for a year, one took singing lessons, one joined an acting class, and a control group had no extracurricular training. The IQ of the children in the two musical groups rose by an average of seven points in the course of a year; those in the other two groups gained an average of 4.3 points.

Schellenberg had long been skeptical of the science underpinning claims that music education enhances children’s abstract reasoning, math, or language skills. If children who play the piano are smarter, he says, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter because they play the piano. It could be that the youngsters who play the piano also happen to be more ambitious or better at focusing on a task. Correlation, after all, does not prove causation.

The 2004 paper was specifically designed to address those concerns. And as a passionate musician, Schellenberg was delighted when he turned up credible evidence that music has transfer effects on general intelligence. But nearly a decade later, in 2013, the Education Endowment Foundation funded a bigger study with more than 900 students. That study failed to corroborate Schellenberg’s findings, finding no evidence that music lessons improved math and literacy skills.

Schellenberg took that news in stride while continuing to cast a skeptical eye on the research in his field. Recently, he decided to formally investigate just how often his fellow researchers in psychology and neuroscience make what he believes are erroneous — or at least premature — causal connections between music and intelligence. His results, published in May, suggest that many of his peers do just that

In Germany, the press hosts the press briefings

Columbia Journalism Review

IT’S A FAMILIAR SCENE: roughly a hundred journalists cram into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, only 49 of them privileged enough to have a seat, competing like school kids for the attention of the president or, more often, his press secretary, wrangling with White House aides over the microphone and granted speaking privileges at the whim of whoever is at the podium. When he watches the White House briefings, Gregor Mayntz is happy to be a German. “Whenever I see this, I think how lucky we are to have the Bundespressekonferenz.”

The Dreamers’ Fears

Die Zeit, 1/11/18 (in German)

Thousands of undocumented young people are studying at US universities. They are facing an uncertain future after the Trump rescinded DACA. ausende Studierende leben illegal in den USA. Unter Donald Trump wächst die Ungewissheit dieser “Dreamer” täglich. Besuch bei zweien, die nicht aufgeben.

Mayra Lozano stammt aus Mexiko. Sie ist 22, aber sie hat das Land seit ihrem fünften Lebensjahr nicht mehr gesehen. Die Studentin der weltweit bekannten University of California in Berkeley, USA, hat keine Erinnerungen an ihr Heimatland, es ist ihr fremd. Sie spricht akzentfreies Englisch und kennt den Fahneneid auswendig, der an vielen amerikanischen Schulen morgens abgelegt wird. Aber ständig schwebt die Gefahr über ihr, dass es eines Tages bei ihr klingelt und sie abgeschoben wird in ihre fremde Heimat. Denn Mayra ist illegal in dem Land, in dem sie seit ihrer Kindheit lebt.

Mayra ist ein “Dreamer”. So heißen die jungen Menschen ohne amerikanische Ausweispapiere, die im Kindesalter von ihren Eltern in die USA gebracht wurden, meist über die Grenze zu Mexiko. Die Bezeichnung leitet sich ab vom Dream Act, einem überparteilichen Gesetzesentwurf, der seit 2001 immer wieder verhandelt, aber nie vom Kongress verabschiedet wurde

About Me

Christoph Drösser is a freelance science writer from Germany living in San Francisco, working mainly for German newspapers, magazines and radio stations. Before arriving in the Bay Area, he was a science editor and reporter at Germany’s major weekly paper, Die Zeit, for 18 years. His weekly column, “Stimmt’s?” (“Is it true that…?”,) about scientific and other urban myths, has been printed weekly since 1997. From 2004 to 2006, he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Zeit Wissen, a bi-monthly popular science magazine still in publication. His radio column, “Stimmt’s?” has aired daily on Radio Eins since 2002.

Christoph Drösser has published about 15 popular science books in Germany, including: Wenn die Dinge mit uns reden (Duden, 2021) about new language technologies based on artificial intelligence, Total berechenbar? Wenn Algorithmen für uns entscheiden (Hanser, 2016,) a book on how algorithms are shaping our daily life; Wie wir Deutschen ticken (Edel, 2015,) Wir Deutschen und das Geld (Edel, 2016) and Wir Deutschen und die Liebe (Edel, 2017,) three books with representative surveys about various general topics about the Germans’ life, and their attitude towards financial matters; Hast du Töne? Warum wir alle musikalisch sind (Rowohlt, 2009,) a book on research about music and the brain, and why everybody is musical; and Der Mathematikverführer (2007,) Der Logikverführer (2012) and Der Physikverführer (2010) (all with Rowohlt,) three popular books on mathematics, physics and logic. Der Mathematikverführer was a national best-seller and sold more than 130,000 copies. He has also written several children’s books, among them 100 Kinder (Gabriel, 2020,) a book with statistics about the children of the wold, and Es geht um die Wurst (Gabriel 2021,) a book about whether we can still eat meat responsibly.

Christoph Drösser was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT (1993-94,) a Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara (2014) and a Journalist in Residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley (2017). From September 2021 to February 2022, he is a fellow at the new MIP.labor at Freie Universität Berlin.

He was awarded the Media Prize of the German Mathematical Association (DMV) in 2008 and was Science Journalist of the Year in Germany (awarded by Medium Magazine) in 2005. For his children’s book “100 Kinder” (together with illustrator Nora Coenenberg) he received the 2021 German Children’s Literatur Award in the non-fiction category.

On Facebook: christophdroesser

On Twitter: chrdr

Literary agent for Germany: Heike Wilhelmi, agenturwilhelmi.de

English version

In the English version of my website, I only include articles published in English, of which there aren’t too many at the moment. Go to the German version (change the language in the upper right corner) to get a more representative picture of what I write about, even if you can’t read every article!

In Order Not to Discriminate, We Might Have to Discriminate

Simons Institute Newsletter, 12/22/17

We all want to be unbiased. We don’t want to hire people based on their gender; we don’t want people to be incarcerated because of the color of their skin. Laws explicitly forbid discrimination on the basis of a set of “protected categories” like sex, race, religion, or age. The conventional wisdom is that fairness is best achieved when you try to be as blind as possible to these categories – for example, by having people apply for a job without stating their name and age or attaching a photograph. Then the employer would pick candidates solely based on their qualification for the job. But this assumption – the essence of many equality laws and court decisions – might be wrong. Mathematically provably wrong

Kids & Codes

Die Zeit, 12/13/17 (in German)

Do kids have to learn to code? Not necessarily, if they understand how computers work.

Wenn es die Kanzlerin sagt, muss es ja stimmen: “Ich glaube, dass die Fähigkeit zum Programmieren eine der Basisfähigkeiten von jungen Menschen wird, neben Lesen, Schreiben, Rechnen.” Das sagte Angela Merkel bei der Eröffnung der Computermesse Cebit in diesem Jahr, und auch der ehemalige US-Präsident Barack Obama (sein Nachfolger hat sich noch nicht zum Thema geäußert) forderte seine jungen Bürger auf, das Coden zu lernen: “Kauft nicht einfach nur ein neues Videospiel – macht eins. Ladet nicht nur die neueste App runter – helft dabei, sie zu entwickeln. Spielt nicht nur auf eurem Telefon – programmiert es.”

“Premature Deaths” – A Questionable Category

Die Zeit, 11/29/17 (in German)

How many people dayd as a consequence of the VW diesel scandal? This is a controversy among statisticians.

Der VW-Abgasskandal hat Menschenleben gekostet. 500 Deutsche sind vorzeitig gestorben, weil Volkswagen bei den Abgaswerten geschummelt hat und die Dieselfahrzeuge der Firma mehr Schadstoffe ausstießen als erlaubt. Das jedenfalls steht in einer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit, die im März in der Zeitschrift Environmental Research Letters erschien. Diese Veröffentlichung steht nicht allein: In den USA hat Volkswagen 59 vorzeitige Todesfälle auf dem Gewissen, berichtete vor zwei Jahren dieselbe Zeitschrift. Sogar für Kalifornien hat ein Forscherteam die Zahlen berechnet: Dort starben zwölf Bewohner zwischen 2009 und 2015 zu früh, weil VW-Fahrzeuge die Luft verpesteten