Science
Nina Kraus, a professor of communication sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, has done a lot of research on the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development. She explains the “musician’s advantage,” which includes better reading skills, and how music training can be a tool to improve the performance of students from low socio-economic backgrounds. *This episode was originally released on June 10, 2020.* Intro (00:01): Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles (00:39): The sound of music, not just a movie about seeing Austrians, but also a fertile field of research, specifically the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development. I'm your host Richard Miles. Today my guest is Nina Kraus, a professor of communication, sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago. Welcome to Radio Cade, Nina. Nina Kraus (01:02): I'm so glad to be here. Richard Miles (01:03): So Nina, you're one of those difficult guests that you have done so much, and we could talk a lot, but then this would not be a 30 minute podcast, it would be like a 30 hour podcast, but I have heard you speak before, and I know you were actually quite good about summarizing your research so I know you're up to the challenge, but I'd like to start out by focusing on one particular area of your work. You've done a lot in sound processing and how the brain processes sound, but why don't we start with some basic definitions for our listeners. So from a scientific perspective or researchers perspective, what is the relationship or the difference, I guess, between music, noise, and language. What's the relationship between those three things? Nina Kraus (01:41): What a great starting question. So sound is the common denominator for all the things that you mentioned and sound is a very under-recognized force in our society. It is very, very powerful, and yet we don't pay very much attention to it because it's invisible, first of all, like a lot of powerful forces like gravity. So you don't think about it. And we live in a very visually biased world. And even scientifically there was a National Institute for Vision 13 years before there was one for hearing. And that was the National Institute for Deafness and Communication. We share that with smell and taste, but all of the things that you mentioned, language, and,