Culture and Education

This month Gunnar Bjursell has interviewed Assal Habibi, Assistant Research Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California. Gunnar and Assal discuss the benefits of music in education and the impact it has on child development Full interview with subtitles in English

Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive—a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Here we present …

This new study between Karolinska Institutet and the Radboud University Medical Center and Vrije University in Holland focused on how months of schooling related to intelligence in 6567 children (aged 9-11), taking into account factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability. Notably, two years of schooling had a larger …

Research shows that playing music also contributes to our overall health and wellbeing and helps our thinking and planning skills. In this popular science article, we will first talk about how various parts of the brain are engaged to make music playing possible. We will also discuss benefits of music …

Music is ubiquitous across human cultures - as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically and emotionally - and learning to play music shapes both brain structure and brain function. Music processing in the brain - namely, the perception of melody, harmony and rhythm - has …

Aesthetic experience seems both regular and idiosyncratic. On one hand, there are powerful regularities in what we tend to find attractive versus unattractive (e.g., beaches versus mud puddles). On the other hand, our tastes also vary dramatically from person to person: what one of us finds beautiful, another might find …