Anyone who's been around small children knows that a sure-fire way to capture their attention is with music.

Hum a song or plink out a tune on a piano or guitar and it's as if you switched on a magnet, as they gather around wanting to join in.

Now there's evidence that that response is not simply a pleasant distraction but an affinity wired into the brain from birth that could also help prepare children for some of the most complex learning they will ever do.

Those are some of the conclusions coming from the work of psychology Prof. Frances Rauscher at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

Rauscher and researchers at the University of California at Irvine made national news in February with a study finding that preschool children in Los Angeles who received music training performed 34% higher on tests for spatial-temporal reasoning than children who were trained on computers or had no special training at all.

Spatial-temporal reasoning is what you use when you figure ratios or proportions or manipulate images of things in your mind. It's at the heart of all so-called higher-level brain functions that you use in playing chess or doing science, mathematics and other complex tasks.

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