Music on the brain

Eric Pakulak brought a bucket of brains — two sheep and one human — to the Douglas County Library Thursday night.

He didn’t bring them out until after his presentation on how music affects the brain, and several audience members stayed to take a closer look at the gray, wrinkly organs.

Pakulak is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon, and he works in the Psychology Department’s Brain Development Lab. He and his colleagues use electrode caps and a functional MRI to study the brain. He’s also a 1986 graduate of Roseburg High School.

The local chapters of the Oregon Music Teachers Association and the Umpqua Valley Federated Music Club sponsored the presentation. The University of Oregon Psychology Department recommended Pakulak, partly because of his connection to Roseburg.

Pakulak is excited about brain research, but he cautions people about assumptions. For instance, children who study music tend to have higher verbal skills, visuo-spatial skills, numeracy skills and IQs. But music may not be the cause. It could be that children with stronger cognitive skills are more likely to study music and stick with it, he said. They may also have more income and better access to resources.

Professional musicians have more auditory brain cells than nonmusicians, he said.

“Can you say definitively that music causes these changes?” he asked the audience of about 60. “Technically we can’t. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”

Pakulak’s specialty is linguistics, but he researched music for the presentation and brought preliminary information from a study the Brain Development Lab is currently conducting.

Early findings, which he stressed are not conclusive, show that 3- to 5-year-olds in Head Start who studied music 40 minutes a day for eight weeks improved in all eight categories they were tested on, including language, preliteracy, visual cognition, estimating and critical thinking.

He also talked about how the brain responds to music, and how babies are adept at distinguishing sounds.

His parents, Bob and Sally Pakulak, had never heard him give a presentation.

“He’s worked so hard to get this far,” Sally said. “It’s hard to try to explain to people what he’s studying because it’s so technical.”

Lyn Biethan teaches kindergarten at Hucrest Elementary School, and she said Pakulak validated what she believed about music’s effects on children. She sings to her students and uses rhythm and rhyme.

“I’m very interested in music, and music in the schools, I think, is really important.”

“I came because I’m fascinated with how the brain works,” said Ann Griessbach of Winchester. She had other reasons, too. She has a new grandchild, and her son and daughter-in-law both work in schools.

Su Har of Melrose brought her three children, Katlyn, 9, Alex, 8, and Skyler, 5. She was hoping to hear about specific studies, she said.

“They’re my kids,” she said. “I try to learn everything I can to raise a better child.”

Katlyn and Alex both take piano lessons, even though Har hated the sound of the piano at first. Now she appreciates it, and she said it’s fun taking the kids to hear the symphony and the orchestra.

The kids were more interested in holding the sheep brains than in the research.

Pakulak enjoyed the audience.

“I was blown away by the turnout,” he said. The enthusiasm for the subject surprised him. “I was just really, really impressed.”



• You can reach reporter Teresa Williams at 957-4230 or via e-mail at twilliams@newsreview.info.