By Mark Ward

Anyone who's been around small children knows that a sure-fire way to capture their attention is with music.
Hum a song or plink out a tune on a piano or guitar and it's as if you switched on a magnet, as they gather around wanting to join in.
Now there's evidence that that response is not simply a pleasant distraction but an affinity wired into the brain from birth that could also help prepare children for some of the most complex learning they will ever do.
Those are some of the conclusions coming from the work of psychology Prof. Frances Rauscher at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
Rauscher and researchers at the University of California at Irvine made national news in February with a study finding that preschool children in Los Angeles who received music training with keyboards performed 34% higher on tests for spatial-temporal reasoning than children who were trained on computers or had no special training at all.
Spatial-temporal reasoning is what you use when you figure ratios or proportions or manipulate images of things in your mind. It's at the heart of all so-called higher-level brain functions that you use in playing chess or doing science, mathematics and other complex tasks.
Recently, Rauscher expanded on her findings at a pair of Wisconsin schools: Wales and Magee elementary schools in the Kettle Moraine School District. She found that kindergarten students at the two schools who took music lessons on piano keyboards scored 36% higher on tests of spatial-temporal reasoning than students who didn't have the lessons.
What's exciting about these latest results, she says, is they show that the improved learning effect that she documented in younger children is still present after they enter school.
Also -- something that will give heart to struggling school districts -- she found an effect with as little as 20 minutes of group piano instruction once a week over three to four months.
The details are still fuzzy, she says. No one is sure what amount of instruction is optimal, or what gains children get with other instruments, such as violins, recorders or drums. Rauscher herself is an accomplished cellist who started at age 5. But the improvements seem undeniably and, from all appearances, permanent.
Exactly how music enhances learning is not clear, but scientists believe that when children receive music instruction their brains form connections between neurons in patterns that also help them to do higher reasoning.
Children whose brains don't make those connections at an early age may never make them. That's because after a few years their brains stop making so many connections and start pruning unused neurons.
That's not to say children won't benefit from music instruction later in life. One study even found that college students improved their reasoning after listening to a Mozart sonata, but the effect lasted only 10 minutes.
Nor does the study suggest that music is the only way to make those connections. Children learn in many ways.
But there aren't very many ways to do such serious learning while having so much fun. At a minimum, Rauscher's findings make a strong case for integrating music into learning as early in life as possible. Who knows? That child stumbling her way through "The Jolly Farmer" may be the next generation's leading scientist.