Catharsis on a daily basis

Is it possible that a child is talented, let’s say in music, but this talent never manifests itself?

Yes, it might happen, let’s say, if music is not part of the daily routine of family life at all, and so there is absolutely no chance for the child to whistle the melody, for example, of an aria they heard on the radio. Or they don’t have a music teacher who asks the students to sing regularly or gets them to try to play an instrument. In other words, the circumstances are not ‘right’ for their talent to manifest itself. Thank God, it is quite rare, as already in primary school there are conscious efforts made to find where pupils’ talents lie.

You once claimed that learning to play an instrument is not really possible in adult years. What is the explanation and neuroscientific basis for this claim?

If someone plans to become a professional musician, they must be availed with certain manual skills whose acquisition is much better facilitated by the brain plasticity of childhood. If a young man of twenty starts to learn to play the piano, neither the cerebellum nor other functional areas of the brain can make the same progress – as to their storage- or processing capacity – as would be the case if he had begun his piano studies in early childhood. The background of this is that although the neurons themselves cannot reproduce – they only die with time – the synaptic connections between them can be recreated. The strength of the synapses between the neurons keeps changing, and if someone uses this network very intensively, the synapses become reinforced. First, the synapses get strengthened, but when they cannot become any stronger, they grow further dendritic branches so that the connectivity becomes even more extensive. The growing number of dendrites will result in an increase in brain volume. This is why it has been experimentally observed that in orchestra musicians both the cerebellum (which plays an important role in motor control) and the language centre are larger than in an average person. Dendritic growth or neuroplasticity is much more efficient in childhood than in adulthood. To play a musical instrument, refined finger movements, highly skilled motor coordination and exceptional speed are crucial skills. These all require plastic reorganisation of a well-developed cerebellum and other brain areas, and this can only be achieved by early development.

Photo: HAS / Tamás Szigeti

Musical talent can manifest itself at an early age, while a gift for science becomes apparent only later. Why is this?

A scientific bent can also become obvious at quite an early age. Some children prefer playing football, whereas others on seeing a beetle immediately start counting its legs and explore why and how they fly. So, I believe that a gift for physics, biology or chemistry manifests itself already in primary school. A good educator, of course, takes note of it. What’s more, an able teacher doesn’t only notice such an interest but stimulates it. We may be talented in many ways, but of all potential career paths, we tend to pick the one that was conveyed by the teacher with the most charismatic personality.

Parents are often advised to have their children study music in the belief that other competencies will also be developed simultaneously, and the children will then learn other school subjects more effectively. How are these skills interconnected?

The neural network of our cerebral cortex stores memory traces. This storage capacity is virtually inexhaustible. Practically everything that has ever happened to us has left a kind of long-lasting trace in our brain. Yet we don’t remember everything. Our creativity and our mental competencies depend on our life experiences that we have come to store, but even more importantly, on how easily we are able to recall these. If we are unable to address these memory traces appropriately and make use of them in our conscious mental processes, they will simply rest there for good and be of no practical use. In order to learn effectively, that is, to put ‘handles’ on these memory parcels so that we can get hold of them and recall them, it is necessary to have a rich inner world that consists of our emotions and motivations, as well as the multi-millennial cultural heritage of mankind, which has a profound impact on these. If our inner world ‘marks’ the memory parcels coming from the external world, we will be able to recall them with more ease. I often use a metaphor here to make this process easier to imagine: our inner world is like the mortar which covers bricks of information; so as these bricks are placed next to and on top of each other, it is the mortar that keeps them together so that we can build a house of knowledge. The thicker the mortar that sticks the bricks together, the wider ranging is our associative capacity; while the more individual and unique this mortar is, representing our inner world, the surer it is that things will evoke thoughts in us that don’t occur to others. This is one of the requirements of creativity.

We could also call it originality, couldn’t we?

Yes, we could. It is our original way of thinking, our mental competence, which reflects our unique and individual inner world. The impulses of our inner world trigger a wave activity via special trajectory systems in our cerebral cortex, and this wave activity harmonises the operation of the neurons in the middle of the coding process. This in turn reinforces their connectivity, and thus the information gets ‘burned’ on the brain. This is how the information parcels of the outer world are sealed through the impulses of our inner world. If these trajectories are not regularly made use of, or there is no emotional or motivational impulse they can transmit, then we cannot learn effectively and no original ideas pop up from superficially stored information. To generate creativity in young people, it is primarily arts that should be focussed on at secondary school.