In brain scans of or­phans, who had hardly any emo­tional care, Harry Chugani of the Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal of Michi­gan docu­mented that their emo­tional brain sys­tems were much less ac­tive than those of chil­dren who ex­peri­enced nor­mal emo­tional care. Their be­hav­iour was, to a great de­gree, emo­tion­ally neu­tral. They de­vel­oped hardly any fear, but also hardly any love.

A mother feels love for her child. Then the sound of her voice and her look will be­come full of love as she takes her child in her arms and ca­resses it.
These sig­nals of love are re­ceived by the child via its sense or­gans, which di­rect them to the world of emo­tion. Ar­rived their, they ini­ti­ate a wave of love as an­swer, which finds its ex­pres­sion through the same sig­nal paths and comes back to the mother.

In this ex­change or train­ing those nerve con­nec­tions are built and con­soli­dated, which enable the ex­peri­ence and ex­pres­sion of love. For a child who is given only a few ex­peri­ences of love, se­cu­rity, joy, ten­der­ness, it is nor­mally much harder to de­velop these quali­ties in his later life than for a child whose world of emo­tion is regu­larly nour­ished with these quali­ties of the heart; be­cause the nerve con­nec­tions which rep­re­sent these quali­ties have not been stimu­lated and con­soli­dated through the sense or­gans as in­ten­sively.

Many neu­ro­sci­en­tists as­sume to­day that in this way all abili­ties of feel­ing, un­der­stand­ing and in­tel­lect re­ceive their neu­ro­logi­cal stimu­la­tion and con­soli­da­tion. The outer stimu­la­tion of these quali­ties is achieved through the sense or­gans. Their im­pulses co-de­cide which net­works in the brain will be con­soli­dated and ex­panded through in­ten­sive use (gain more im­por­tance) and which ones will re­ceive a rather small im­por­tance or will be even given up com­pletely.

This find­ing of neu­ro­sci­ence is of utmost im­por­tance for edu­ca­tion, be­cause, auto­mati­cally the ques­tion arises con­cern­ing the qual­ity of what travels through the sense or­gans to the brain and takes a share in shap­ing its ar­chi­tec­ture. How im­por­tant this ques­tion is be­comes very clear, when one of these sense or­gans is not work­ing cor­rectly, as for in­stance the ear.

Let us take as an ex­ample the abil­ity to ab­stract. An ab­stract term is one we can­not taste, or smell, or see and/or touch, but one can de­scribe it with words. This means, the ear is re­spon­si­ble for an outer stimu­la­tion of the abil­ity to ab­stract and of its re­lated nerve con­nec­tions in the brain.

And the re­search with hear­ing im­paired chil­dren states (17, 18): with the hear­ing ca­pac­ity via the ear sub­stan­tially re­duced then, as a rule, the con­cerned per­son shows a strong defi­cit in the abil­ity to ab­stract.

In this con­text, the in­ves­ti­ga­tions gain im­por­tance which in­di­cate that, through lis­ten­ing to com­plex har­mo­ni­ous mu­sic, very dif­fer­ent cog­ni­tive per­form­ances im­prove (1, 19, 20) such as mem­ory, learn­ing abil­ity, abil­ity to ab­stract, mathe­mati­cal abili­ties, ana­lyti­cal abili­ties, logic and in­tel­li­gence in di­verse forms.

Since mu­sic stimu­lates the cog­ni­tive and emo­tional brain sys­tems, these get a kind of train­ing by lis­ten­ing to mu­sic. There­fore, for the mu­sic lis­tener, an im­por­tant ques­tion arises. Of what qual­ity, how de­mand­ing is the mu­sic piece for the sphere of un­der­stand­ing; and which qual­ity of emo­tion does it stimu­late?
Is it struc­tured in a com­plex way, of natu­ral har­monic logic, rich in varia­tions and does it stimu­late life-pro­mot­ing quali­ties of emo­tion? Then such a mu­sic will also stimu­late the cor­re­spond­ing brain sys­tems.

Our sense or­gans com­pre­hend our whole range of ex­peri­ence. This means, to a cer­tain de­gree, we be­come what we hear, touch, see, smell and taste.

Here lies in­valu­able po­ten­tial but, at the same time mu­sic has great dan­ger for edu­ca­tion. Ac­cord­ing to its cog­ni­tive and emo­tional qual­ity it takes in­flu­ence on the ar­chi­tec­ture and ac­tiv­ity of the brain – par­ticu­larly if it is heard regu­larly.

Enough in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­di­cate (1, 27) that mu­sic, if lis­tened to often, that is primi­tive in struc­ture, cha­otic and emo­tion­ally de­pres­sive / ag­gres­sive pro­duces emo­tional and so­cial be­hav­iour, that is nega­tive up to an in­creased readi­ness for vio­lence and crimi­nal be­hav­iour.
But, if mu­sic is cog­ni­tively mani­fold and highly in­te­grated and emo­tion­ally life sup­port­ing, the lis­tener un­folds in­creas­ingly more in­tel­li­gence, in­ner hap­pi­ness and so­cial har­mony (5).