Neurons Behind Notes: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Bridging Psychology and Neuroscientific Insights for Music Learning, Performance, and Pedagogy

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the literature in educational neuroscience as well as music cognition, exploring new insights in psychology and neuroscience concerning learning and brain plasticity in the last thirty years. This serves as an interdisciplinary study and manual for musicians, providing fundamental scientific concepts that potentially answer “why” and “how” music is perceived and performed. Analysis of these fundamental concepts provides a basis for greater understanding of performance and pedagogical approaches to learning and teaching music. This will include an overview of educational neuroscience and music cognition, the fundamentals of neuron structure and function in learning and memory, a large literature review of studies concerning musical training and its effects on plasticity, a proposal for preliminary experiments on hippocampal cell firing in relation to accuracy and memory, as well as important literature concerning long-term memory functions, motor skill acquisition, and creativity.