Hard to decide which is more completely wrong-road twisted and lost of way, the multiple bloggers I've found citing this stuff as sliced bread goodness, or the people who proffer it up for profit, or maybe the folks who buy into it to the tune of a major industry. The objective is fine of itself, to work to be better tomorrow than one was today, to work to keep mentally acute and fit, to stay mentally agile and so save others the need to dote and care over your advancing years, or even so as to ensure the peak condition and progressive cognitive development for growing minds, from 8 to 80 as the boardgames used to say:

Participants play fitness games for about an hour per day on a computer, training their brains to react to certain stimuli faster, thereby speeding up the process of when nerve cells talk to each other.
[ Reality Sandwich | Brain Workout ]

But dig, before you shell-out the subscriber fee for your ticket to übermench-hood, I want you to know something: there is something very very wrong here, fundamentally wrong, epidemically wrong, culturally wrong, and needlessly wrong, and I'll tell you what it is.

right direction, wrong road

First off, on the click through that leads you to the marketing pitch for PositScience and their 'insight' kits, a click through that is nearly all flash and hence un-clippable, some of their more salient claims, and I'm not saying they can't deliver on these claims, there's every reason to believe they can and do, but I just want you to have this mental model, as a brain exercise if you will, just as a reference for discussion. They promise that insight training will make you:

• Think faster, focus better, remember more
• Use "clinically proven" programs
• Speed up reaction times
• Improve driving skills
• Help you maintain health-related quality of life (sic)
• Boost your confidence
• Make you "feel so much better"

There's more, but that's the key stuff, the front-page pitch stuff and all of it noble claims that are going to ring bells with especially the aging boomers that form the majority of the models posing for the everyday-people clip-art on the site, but also registering for parents looking at Globalization and realizing their kids will need some sort of edge if they don't want to get trained for sorts of jobs that left for Mexico ages ago.

Now here is my stark, clinical fact of science, the answer to the question, the reason you've read thus far:

All of those claims are equally met by taking flute lessons.

Or clarinet, or saxophone, french horn, trumpet, tuba, oboe, drums or any other instrument that requires a complete mind-body relation to sustain. Total cost: maybe $300 for the first decent instrument, maybe $15-$30 weekly for tutelage.

The modern evidence is staggering; the ancient evidence reaches back to Plato and before. Music is fundamental to human cognition, it is the essence of our language, the core aesthetic of our mathematics, it is abstraction made real and as such, it tickles our percepts in ways that lead us to a certain way of sound. Its the making of such now-real abstractions that becomes the peculiar yoga we call 'music', and its in that yoga that the practice becomes holistically not just brain-food, but a whole mind-body health quality of life.

For example, with a woodwind, you're going to need your lungs, you're going to need your teeth, your muscle tone and reaction speed, your mind-body feedback is critical to even the beginner's sound. Even with drums, it is a total whole-you involvement thing, you need to be there, you need to be fit, you need to be the best you can be and the better a you that you can become, the more obviously pleasing and personally encouraging the immediate tangible result.

For a mere grand, the cost of a small home theatre, for the cost of a game-system and a handful of games, you can meet or exceed the brain-calisthenicists on every point! Sight-reading of the notation will hone your acuity, reaction time and symbolic processing, learning extended arrangements will advance your memory capacity, focus and pattern thinking, breath control and embouchure will advance your neurology and physique, encourage your posture and proper oxygenation of your brain.

But dig, and dig this deeply, it doesn't stop there!

But wait, there's more! Act now! Operators are standing by!

Yes, you get more. You get the fitness, the mental fitness, the enhanced mental skills, the improved perceptual and neurocognitive powers, you get all that for just $999, but if you act now, you also get much much more. This special offer is time limited, you must act today because ... well, um, no, forget that. There is no time limit really. None. You can start this program any time you like, age 8, age 80, it just don't matter, and that too is a matter of clinical medical science fact. Maybe you won't play for the Philharmonic if you start later than age 16, but there's not many of those jobs anyway; for the rest, you still get every last one of those promised improvements, only it may take a little longer to get there.

But here's the real kicker, here's the real reason I found those brain-gym people to be so astoundingly wrong-headed and lost little sheep in their base core fundamental concept of action.

Playing music, you improve the beauty of the world. In ensemble, you improve the social fabric of your neighbourhood, you provide the thread that binds culture, you become part of something greater than yourself, and your very existence as that 3rd F-Horn is absolutely essential, the sound, the experience, the emotional experience is diminished by your absense. This far transcends the 'self-esteem' of merely completing the Grade-Two exam or whatever, this far exeeds the winning of awards. There is that dimension too, and an even more potent self-status in the achievement of final mastery of some particularly difficult game-level in a difficult piece, but unlike the Wii-game metaphor your mastery of the Coffee Cantata brings joy and happiness to others and makes your world a more beautiful place.

Because of you, because of the dedicated work and the mind-body discipline and yogic self-development which you endured.

All for the price of a Wii and a handful of forgotten games.

It does boggle my imagination and stagger my comprehension when I struggle to understand precisely why the schools do not include rich and earnest band programs right from the early grades up (they do in much of Europe), or why parents will spend that order of money on game systems that will be obsolete within two years and yet waver over the start-up costs when there's such a staggering ROI. It is incredible when you think of it, that two years of a Wii or a Widescreen should trump superior cognitive development and a skill of beauty that will never be completely forgotten.

or obsolesced.

Also and equally amazing, the number of adults I meet who used to play the X in high school and it now sits in some closet for any of ten dozen no-reasons, all while they moan about work stress pressure, about keeping up, keeping fit, about keeping tuned and there's the key, right there, already paid for, just sitting there, silent and alone. Clearly there's a deep cognitive psychological explanation, but I'm hard pressed to conceive it, and whatever it actually is, it clearly represents some sort of communications failure in the music education system:

Painless and free neural rejuvenation exercises that also enhance the social fabric of my neighbourhood? Um ... No thank you, I'd rather be weak and stressed out, stay slow thinking and sit alone in my stuffy darkened room wrecking my thumb muscles with Repetitive Stress actions on a self-obsessed violence-themed bogus-reward Skinner Box, but thank you all the same

What a piece of work is a man! We're pretty blazingly impressive creatures in our obstinance, really. That we, collectively, as a creature, would overwhelmingly make that choice that way, time after time, all ages, world-wide, spontaneously and unanimously as if the decision had some barest inkling of an ecological validity, that our popular culture should prefer to stereotype the community ensemble players with movies like American Pie (to a soundtrack in real-fact played by a large, skilled and disciplined ensemble!) that level of basic survival-skill denial is really pretty impressive reactance.

We, as a species, should win some kind of award.

Conspicuous Omissions

Ok, the astute are going to want to jump up and down and point out that I've omitted the guitar from my list, I've omitted the piano too, all of the popular pop-music gear and practically dismissed that whole genre. As one who's come to these realizations via that world, let me reassure you that I'm not saying you can't get faster-smarter-better-healthier playing in that realm, but I do want to say that those instruments and genres are most popular precisely because you can avoid all those benefits.

I'm all for everyone playing their own music their own way and having a party, but we're speaking neurological-enhancement here, and in that context, Play What Thou Wilst takes far greater discipline to avoid becoming musical junk food. Arnold Shultz was a poor Kentucky coal miner, but he still worked hard at that guitar until he mastered it, he wasn't ever happy being just a Book One of Mel Bay sort of player, and come payday, the likes of Mose Rager, Merl Travis and young Bill Monroe would shed a few dollars his way because they needed to learn how to do that thing he did so well.

We do see superbly fit rock guitarists, we see pop-groups who have sweated eons of blood to produce a dazzling precision, and many of the top acts are compelled to be that way just to do their job, I won't discount that, I only want to note how in those instruments the mechanics of an 'acceptable' sound production quality is nearly a given of the machine, whereas a deep mind-body engagement is fundamentally pre-requisite and inescapable to the sound of woodwind because the energy comes 100% from you. You are the source and maker of the sound, from deep within your anatomy right out to your lips and finger tips, it is a far more deeply holistic whole-body cyborg experience.

That's one side of it, the personal yoga of musicianship, and on the other side, the extended-mix side, the woodwinds are by cultural nature a social ritual, only very rarely seen solo, overwhelmingly a coordinated empathic precision ensemble experience, and that aspect is also fundamental from nearly the start of study, and critical to the development of many of the higher-order cognitive and social benefits. You need to be in tune and aware of others. The pop-music branded small-combo genre, like most of it's parent corporation The Music Biz, is largely first-person 'star' centric, heroic in nature, stellar-radiant divisive rather than compassionately cohesive comprehensive, and contrary to the pre-renaissance anonymous common-good social fabric of both the folk and the 'serious' ensemble. Naturally, yes, there are the Seven Deadly Sins that can infiltrate a player of any sort of mode or instrument -- that's why we teach children about those entrapments -- but it is nonetheless harder to fall into the traps from the nothing special community-purpose ensemble, be that a squaredance jump-up band or a civic concert group, because, in most cases, there is no reward you can dominate and monopolize; any 'reward' as such is equitably distributed to each according only to their actual body-brain beauty-building efforts, and hence intrinsically this is a community reward.

But back to the point, back to the thesis, back at the notion of brain building exercise, the ease of play in the skiffle concept hits the John Cage quote

"It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction."

which is to say the cognitive aerobic engagement is in descending order, the calisthenics are progressively less rigorous, and if I might dare trump my teacher (and I do ;) I'll prefix John's with another taken from other brain-music neuro-results reported here before, that best of all is to compose the piece of music while playing it, be that in the sense of Mozart's cadenzas or Satchmo's ensemble teasing at the structural limits of the work, John Coltrane fronting new vanguards beyond it, or Ornette's ensemble co-composition reinventing the concept of composition all at once together as they go, the common thread is a interpersonal mind-body engagement and the progression from Louis to Ornette may set that thread on a truly evolutionary lay-line, outward bound, destinations unknown.

From a simple tip on mental development, to honing and retaining cognitive skills, to the unintended consequences of social and societal development, to a mind-body meta yoga that lifts the whole of humanity upward and forward and on, all of which, y'know, I just don't sense in the brain-boost 'insight' marketing materials.