Below is a video by Anita Collins that explains how playing music lights up the entire brain, affecting the visual, auditory, and motor cortices.

The video discusses the benefits of music learning, playing music, and the advantages musicians have, the highlights of which I have paraphrased below:

• strengthens brain functions that can be applied to other activities
• develops fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres
• develops linguistic and mathematical precision
• explains why musicians solve problems more effectively and creatively in both academic and social settings
• crafting and understanding of music leads to higher levels of executive function (planning, strategizing, attention to detail) and simultaneous analysis of cognitive and emotional aspects
• musicians have enhanced memory (create, store, retrieve more quickly and efficiently) with multiple tags stored as conceptual, emotional, audio, and contextual
• studying and playing music is different from any other activity studied incl other arts

How playing an instrument benefits your brain
Lesson by Anita Collins / Animation by Sharon Colman Graham
Length: 4:44

Full lesson

See also:

• “When will I ever need this in real life?”

• Music as a Barometer of Your Well-Being