Music is good for the health. And drumming may be best of all. As well as being physically demanding, it requires people to adjust their limbs and to react to outside stimuli, such as what the rest of the band is up to. It is particularly helpful for children who have emotional and behavioral difficulties.
Researchers at the Clem Burke Drumming Project , an organization named after Blondie's drummer, who was one of its founders , have shown that teaching such children to drum helps them to control their reactions more generally, to focus more effectively on tasks they are given, and to communicate better with other people.
The project's latest work, led by Cahart of King's College, London, goes a step further. It looks at the neurological (神经系统的) changes which accompany these shifts.
Ms. Cahart and her colleagues found 36 autistic (自闭症)teenagers and divided them into two groups. One had drum lessons twice a week for eight weeks. The others did not. At the beginning and end of the project, everyone was asked to stay still for 45 minutes in a machine to see how the activity of their brains had changed. Their behaviour was also recorded.
As expected, most of the drumming group showed positive behavioral changes. And these were indeed reflected in their brains. The machine scans showed that several groups of connectivity between parts of those brains had strengthened during the experiment. In particular, two regions involved in attention control, formed strong links, respectively, with places associated with introspection (内省) and with areas involved in understanding facial expressions.
These changes in the brain thus nicely match the changes in behaviour which learning to drum brings. Not a surprise, perhaps. But drumming's power to heal is confirmed.
