You have reached Mr. Letteron's announcements page
From the Los Angeles Times, reporting on a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience:
The latest findings, presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Los Angeles, underscore how music--as an almost universal language of mood, emotion and desire--orchestrates a wide variety of neural systems to cast its evocative spell. "Undeniably, there is a biology of music," said Harvard University Medical School neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo. "There is no question that there is specialization within the human brain for the processing of music. Music is biologically part of human life, just as music is aesthetically part of human life." . . .
Overall, music seems to involve the brain at almost every level. Even allowing for cultural differences in musical tastes, the researchers found evidence of music's remarkable power to affect neural activity no matter where they look in the brain, from primitive regions in all animals to more recently evolved regions thought to be distinctively human.
From a University of Texas website discussing the correlation between the arts in education and intelligence:
Data reveals a correlation between arts education, including music, and SAT scores. Students who were involved in arts education achieved higher SAT scores. The longer students were involved in arts education, the higher the increase in SAT scores. This study also correlated arts education with higher scores in standardized tests, reading, English, history, citizenship, and geography. An individual's socioeconomic status plays a role in the attainment of arts education. The higher an individual's socioeconomic status, the greater the likelihood of participation in arts education. To account for the advantage given by a relatively higher socioeconomic status, the same studies were done with a focus on students with a relatively lower socioeconomic status. The results indicated that students with a relatively lower socioeconomic status, that were exposed to arts education, had an advantage over those students without any arts education which was proportionally equal to the students with a relatively higher socioeconomic status and exposure to arts education.
