Motor Skills
Music education allows for the development of fine motor skills. According to the online Encyclopedia for Children’s health, hand-eye coordination is “the ability of the vision system to coordinate the information received through the eyes to control, guide, and direct the hands in the accomplishment of a given task, such as handwriting or catching a ball. Hand-eye coordination uses the eyes to direct attention and the hands to execute a task”. In an article from the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences entitled, “The Neurosciences and Music II: From Perception to Performance,” Eugenia Costa-Giomi writes the following in the introduction to the article,
Musicians outperform nonmusicians in certain perception tasks that require an
accurate and immediate motor response to a visual stimulus. These results have
been taken as evidence that music training increases the speed and accuracy of
the visual–motor association. Similarly, the anatomical differences in the
sensorimotor cortex found between musicians and nonmusicians suggest that
extensive music practice affects the organization of this cortical area. Studies that
focused on the cortical representation of hand fingers during intensive keyboard
practice sessions have indeed shown clear changes over periods as short as five
days and as long as two weeks.
Music education is proven to have beneficial effects on the development of fine motor skills in today’s youth.
