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How many of remember when we were in school or our young children were involved in some form of music, whether it was singing or in band. Truth be known, today neurologists are prescribing music for successful health treatments of serious health conditions like Parkinson's, stroke, Alzheimer's, and depression, with additional studies finding out that things like music lessons are providing a beneficial workout for the brain. Not only cheaper than medication, music on all levels is much more pleasant on the senses and causing positive changes in our body.

Against our dismay, studies with compelling evidence show that musical geniuses exhibiting extreme musical talent have a different brain development. The questions that are being asked by those who are performing the studies are whether or not those differences were there through musical practice or from birth. "This is the first paper showing differential brain development in children who learned and played a musical instrument versus those that did not," saysGottfried Schlaug of Harvard Medical School.

Those who were tested by Schlaug are untrained six-year olds in the Boston, MA, area—16 with no keyboard lessons and 15 with weekly keyboard lessons for 15 months. When the MRI scans were done on both groups, they showed auditory and motor skills in the brain were linked with both dexterity and hearing but only in the musical group. When the study was over, those same children outperformed the other group in discrimination of sounds and manual dexterity even though both groups were matched in skills such as math.

The studies are showing that the brain, as a muscle which changes with exercise, change in its growth and focuses depending on the area of exercise. Hopefully, new studies will find out if a decrease or no musical practice will demonstrate further brain changes. But adult studies have shown us that brains, such as the 2000 Maguire scans of the brains of London cabbie which demonstrated abnormally large hippocampus---considered vital for navigation---may result in similar changes occurring in adult musical trainees.

Earlier in history, it was well known that anyone who was musical was considered to be healthy , more creative and for some reason were better choices as reproductive mates.  A 1933 famed French composer, Maruice Ravel, demonstrated neurological symptoms that were unknown during that time—eventually demonstrating focal cerebral degeneration, an early clue that music is a "whole-brain activity" as compared to one part over another.

“The brain is set up to learn. That's what it does,” said neuroscientist, Dan Levitin. “As infants, we are like little statistical calculators looking for dependencies and patterns. It's how we learn language and how we learn music. Very quickly, we learn the rules of what makes music music.”