雅思阅读 159: How Music Rewires the Young Brain（音乐如何重塑年轻的大脑）

改编自 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences / PMC（Hyde et al. longitudinal study）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2948283/

Reading Passage

A. Professional musicians have long been known to differ from the rest of us in ways that show up on a brain scan. Decades of imaging have found that the grey matter of a concert pianist is thicker in the regions devoted to the fine control of the fingers, that the band of fibres connecting the two hemispheres is bulkier in people who practised from childhood, and that the cortex responding to sound is more finely tuned. For a long time these observations raised an uncomfortable question that scientists could not settle: do people who become musicians simply start out with brains that are already a little unusual, drawn to the piano by some innate advantage? Or does years of disciplined practice itself sculpt the organ, turning a normal child into an expert? Cross-sectional scans of adults could not distinguish the two explanations, because they look backward in time. To know whether practice causes the change, you have to watch the same developing brains before, during and after they learn. A set of careful longitudinal studies has now done exactly that, and the answer has broad consequences for how we think about talent, effort and the brain's openness to being shaped.

B. The pivotal study followed a group of children around the age of six who were just about to begin weekly keyboard lessons. Crucially, the researchers scanned all of them on a magnetic resonance machine before a single note was played, and they compared them with a matched control group of children the same age, from similar homes, with similar initial scores on tests of hearing, movement and musicality, who would not start lessons. At the outset, no structural difference separated the two groups — a baseline that matters enormously, because it rules out the worry that musical children were somehow born with bigger motor areas. The children then trained for fifteen months, after which everyone was scanned a second time. What the team saw was small but unmistakable. Those who had learnt to play showed greater growth in grey matter in the right side of the motor cortex that controls the hand, in the right auditory region that processes incoming sound, and in the middle of the thick band of fibres joining the two hemispheres. The non-musical children, scanned at the same intervals, did not show the same pattern. Practice, in other words, had left a visible mark on the brain itself.

C. The finding fits with what musicians had always reported anecdotally, but it carries a sharper message about timing. Comparisons of adult experts repeatedly find that those who began their training before the age of seven have the largest fibre tract connecting the hemispheres — a difference that grows weaker the later lessons start. The likely explanation is not that seven-year-olds are smarter but that the young brain is still pruning and reshaping itself, open to being carved by whatever it is asked to do. An instrument offers a peculiarly demanding workout: it demands that the eyes read notation, the ears judge pitch, the fingers strike with precision, and the sense of time hold all four in synchrony, often for hours at a stretch. Few ordinary activities pack so many senses, so tightly bound, into a single repeated hour. Small wonder that the regions responsible should grow, the way a muscle thickens under a regular load. The image is not of a brain that is gifted at music but of a brain that, being plastic, becomes whatever it is trained to be.

D. The most contested question, though, is whether these musical changes transfer to anything beyond the concert hall. Parents are sold the idea that piano lessons make children better at mathematics, or sharper at reading, or smarter generally, and the marketing has long outrun the evidence. Careful reviews find that the story is more nuanced. Children who study music do, on average, show improvements in auditory discrimination — the ability to tell two close pitches apart, a skill directly relevant to both music and to perceiving the rhythms of speech. Some also show modest gains in the fine motor control that playing demands. But claims of a broad boost to general intelligence, making a child a better all-round student, have been harder to reproduce in studies that randomise children to music or to a comparable demanding activity such as drama. The honest reading is that music trains precisely the abilities music requires, and only cautiously spills over into neighbours. The transfer is real where the underlying skills overlap — listening, timing, disciplined attention — and illusory where it is wished rather than measured.

E. Why should this matter beyond conservatoires? The larger lesson is that the young brain is an organ whose physical form is still being written by experience, and that the experiences we choose for children are not merely filling time but selecting which circuits grow thicker. The studies do not say every child must learn an instrument. They do suggest that a child who never practises a demanding, multisensory skill of any kind — music, dance, a language, a craft — is leaving on the table a window of development that will never quite reopen. The romantic myth of the born genius, it turns out, obscures a more useful truth: the difference between an expert and an ordinary listener is not, at its root, a different kind of brain but the same plastic brain, asked, repeatedly and young, to do something hard. The rewiring was never magic. It was, quite literally, practice taking shape. Parents hoping to give a child this edge are therefore best advised to treat music not as a tonic for general cleverness but as a demanding craft worth pursuing for its own measurable rewards.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why musicians' brains look different — and the question it raised ii. Scanning children before and after lessons settles the question iii. Why starting young seems to matter most iv. The discovery that music raises general intelligence by 30 per cent v. Do musical gains transfer to maths, reading and intelligence? vi. Why the piano is the only instrument worth studying vii. The broader lesson for how we raise children

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why were children scanned before any lessons began? A. To prove that MRI machines were safe. B. To establish a baseline that ruled out pre-existing brain differences. C. To choose the most talented children. D. To measure their musical taste.

6. What changed after fifteen months of keyboard lessons? A. No difference could be detected in either group. B. The musical children showed growth in motor, auditory and inter-hemisphere regions. C. The control group grew faster than the musical group. D. The children lost the ability to distinguish pitches.

7. What do comparisons of adult experts repeatedly find? A. Those who started before age seven have the largest connecting fibre tract. B. Age of starting makes no difference at all. C. All musicians have smaller auditory regions. D. Only violinists show changes.

8. What does the evidence say about claims that music raises general intelligence? A. They are now proven beyond doubt. B. They are harder to reproduce than gains in directly related skills. C. They apply only to boys. D. They show IQ rises by 30 points.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Before training, the two groups showed no structural difference in the brain regions studied.
10. The children trained for five years before being re-scanned.
11. Musical training improved the children's ability to distinguish close pitches.
12. Randomised trials have confirmed that piano lessons raise a child's overall IQ by a fixed amount.
13. The authors recommend that every child be legally required to learn an instrument.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The longitudinal study found visible growth in grey matter in the motor cortex, the auditory region and the middle of the (14) __________; the young brain remains unusually (15) __________ to being shaped by repeated practice.

答案与解析

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