Musicians Have Higher IQ than Non-Musicians

A recent study indicates that musical training determines musicians to yield higher IQ scores than their non-musician counterparts. This is due to the fact that they tend to use both of their brain sides more frequently than regular people.

Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park, psychologists from the Vanderbilt University, have focused their research on how professional musicians are aided by the divergent thinking technique in using both hemispheres of the frontal cortex in their brain. This comes as a result of their using both hands in order to perform distinct moves with their hands when playing musical instruments, independently from one another. As Folley explained, “We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box'. We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity”.

Prior studies on creativity topics were also related to the divergent thinking technique (the capacity of discovering alternative solutions to multiple aspect, open-ended matters), and indicated that the most creative people show increased levels of this technique in comparison with average individuals. “Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” added Folley. “Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”

The test involved 20 classical music students and 20 psychology students of similar age, SAT scores and education levels from the Vanderbilt University. “When we measured subjects' prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information,” Folley concluded.