Brain, behavior, biology, and music: Some research findings and their implications for educational policy

As an invited contributor to Arts Education Policy Review, I am pleased to have this opportunity to address a readership directly concerned with educational policy. But I have the mark of the interloper. As a university instructor for more than thirty years, I have some knowledge of education, but it does not extend to preschool and K-12. Nor have I expertise as a practitioner in the arts or as a teacher in arts education. My background is in experimental psychology and the physiology of the nervous system. More specifically, my own laboratory is concerned with the questions of how learning takes place in the brain and how the brain makes memories. The fact that I study mainly the auditory cortex (the highest level of the auditory system) brought me into contact with some of the research literature on music, and I have done some research on the neurophysiology of music.