Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT | Hacker News Reader

Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT

inc.com

After reading the study about musicians, it compares the gray matter in musicians and no musicians. In particular:

> The cluster of cerebellar gray matter differences in our study is located in [...] This region may correspond to the area of the cerebellar finger-hand representation as shown in some functional imaging studies [...]

In the paper there is relation with IQ or any other metric of intelligence or language ability.

And the study about coding says:

> Here, we used fMRI to investigate two candidate brain systems: the multiple demand (MD) system, typically recruited during math, logic, problem solving, and executive tasks, and the language system, typically recruited during linguistic processing. [...] We found that the MD system exhibited strong bilateral responses to code in both experiments, whereas the language system responded strongly to sentence problems, but weakly or not at all to code problems. [...]

Also, in the paper there is relation with IQ or any other metric of intelligence or language ability.

So, none of the research study support the claims of the press article.

Not music... cooking. Write a recipe. It's the same as code.

To bake a cake you need explicit instructions, including time, temperature, and exact ingredients.

You need 'subroutines' for things like icing, which is another recipe.

And when you write a recipe for me, it is not sufficient to say "stir"... you need to say what the stopping condition is. The stopping condition has to be 'measurable'. For example, I can't cook hamburger because I can't tell when "all of the red" is gone (I'm color blind to red-green).

There are 'user interface' issues... cake decorating.

Plus if someone find out that your 'cake' is over a month old, they are sure to insist it needs to be 'redone', just like real code.

I love cooking and I program. I like the slight monotonous process of cooking such as chopping vegetables finely and measuring with a beaker.

I both program as well as play guitar.

When learning these, I felt my brain physically change for the better. First for coding, then again later for the guitar.

Why choose one, when you can have both?

Was in my early twenties when I started to play the guitar. In hindsight I consider this as one of the best decisions in my life.

I'd love to hear more on why you think so.

I took piano lessons as a kid and learned how to play pretty well, but really hated the lessons, so I convinced my parents to let me stop. Now as a parent myself with two young kids, I regret that decision pretty often.

Now I'm wondering how much pressure I should put on my kids to learn music, or if I should simply expose them to it and let them decide for themselves how much they'd like to get into it.

It's hard to say. There are lots of things we make kids do that are good for them that they'd never want to do on their own, like go to school, do their homework, eat their vegetables.

And with something like music, it takes a lot of unpleasant effort and hard work initially before it hits a point where you really can start enjoying it. But kids would never have experienced such payoffs before, so having faith in perservering seems impossible. So one could argue that forcing a kid to commit and invest until they see the payoff, is the only way they can make a truly informed decision.

Or we can have faith that kids are a lot more mature and wise than we think. And maybe they've already seen all the way into the future and the end result. Or there is a different passion that they'd rather pursue.

I was never forced. I was given the opportunity. I can give no reasoning for this but I would say it taught me to conentrate but still to let it flow from my fingers at the same time. Performing in a relaxed state of mind. Also playing live (very rare). It made me more creative and that's not limited to music. I dealt differently with making mistakes. They happen. Part of the game. How does success feel? Try to bring on some very hard Bach piece and you know it. And also humbleness that someone like Bach could compose such fine music. Finely tuned attention to details. Finding pleasure in how a single note is struck and then fades into silence. You can struck it in ten different ways. Still being part of a team / band despite performing on your own. Discovering more and more music and admiring the effort that went into making the music. This list is endless...

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