By Mary Ellen Ternes
With tight fiscal budgets, we find ourselves making do with less in all kinds of circumstances, including education. Frequently the brunt of those cutbacks is borne by diminishing art and music in school curricula. How do art and music, and languages for that matter, compare to reading, writing and arithmetic? Are they less important? Or do they fit within a broader, more rigorous and comprehensive approach to developing necessary mental skills?
A lot of developmental scientists believe the latter, and see art, music and languages as critical neural training supporting other intellectual skills, reinforcing “synaptic density” and “cognitive reserve,” terms that reference measures of brain health and endurance. In a basic sense, art requires spatial manipulation skills allowing visualization in three dimensions necessary for design, whether the design be architectural, engineering processes or even basic functional relationships. Music requires pattern recognition, phrasing and quantitative manipulation skills necessary in math. In fact, scientists have recognized that music and math are not really that dissimilar and that children who listen to music do better at math, because both disciplines involve the brain in similar ways. Music has even been demonstrated to strengthen neural pathways and enhance cognitive and sensory abilities that support processing speech.
Of course, the benefits of such brain training aren’t just limited to youngsters. For example, researchers have found that the neural enhancements exhibited in musically-trained individuals assist these same individuals when they are older, combating age-related communication problems and keeping the mind sharper as we age. Learning multiple languages at any age requires cognitive reserve, fending off dementia and allowing better recoveries from strokes. Ideally, it seems these methods of training our brains should be considered necessary prerequisites for higher education and mental strength training for all of us as we grow older.
The value of creative cognitive skills in meeting today’s economic, social and environmental challenges was recently discussed at The International Women’s Forum 2011 World Cornerstone Conference in Rome. The IWF’s goals include advancing women’s leadership across careers, cultures and continents by connecting female leaders around the world. IWF summits provide a unique opportunity to explore global issues from the perspective of international women leaders, and the 2011 Cornerstone Conference was no exception. IWF’s Oklahoma Chapter was represented by Lou Kerr, The Kerr Foundation, Inc., President and Chair of the Oklahoma IWF Chapter, Mary Frates, Founder and Former President of the Oklahoma Arts Institute, Secretary of the Oklahoma IWF Chapter, and Dr. Freda Deskin, ASTEC, Inc., CEO.
With the theme “Art Transforming the World,” the IWF panel sessions addressed the role of creativity in meeting the challenges of our world’s sustainable future. The panel sessions included international experts from such diverse fields as art, music, fashion, film, innovation and design processes, business, architecture, mathematics, engineering and medicine.
The panelists responded to questions from women leaders, some of whom expressed frustration with financial cutbacks in education targeting the arts. These experts described the critical benefits of employing creative processes in innovation and design in a broad spectrum of applications including the economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainable development – where diverse and interdisciplinary skill sets are foundational.
The refrain of “don’t neglect the arts!” is not only international, but also being raised in the context of the STEM movement: a U.S. educational funding initiative to expand the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Some educators are calling for changing STEM to STEAM, to teach the Arts as well, recognizing the benefit of incorporating art and technological results.
My own personal experience leads me to believe that being raised by a working classical artist and studying classical piano as a child gave me a lifelong appreciation of the transcendent power of beauty in most things, but also a real advantage in math and three-dimensional visualization. That advantage proved quite handy while studying chemical engineering, imagining molecular interactions, energy and matter transport phenomena and fluid flow, and then describing these complex mechanisms with mathematical formulas. I’m also quite sure studying French, including a summer immersion course in Vichy, helped this passably articulate engineer pursue a second career in law. Toujours la croissance!
Be Informed
Discussion regarding the effect of music on listening, learning, memory attention and literacy skills, and the benefit of musical training as we age, see:
To read about the benefit of bilingualism in delaying the onset of dementia, visit
For general resources regarding music and the brain, see
For a fun example of the relationship between math and music, see this mathematician’s forensic mathematical method of identifying the opening chord of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night”
And this mathematician’s resolution of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” pitch and tempo anomalies
To learn about the International Women’s Forum, go to
To read about the “STEAM not STEM” movement and peruse in-depth research, visit
Mary Ellen Ternes, Esq. is a former chemical engineer from both the EPA and industry. She is currently a shareholder with McAfee & Taft and co-chair of its Renewable and Sustainable Energy Industry Group, and is serving a three-year term as City of Nichols Hills Environment, Health and Sustainability Commissioner.
This article was published in the August 2011 issue of Slice Magazine. It is reproduced with permission from the publisher. © 2011 Southwestern Publishing.