Transcriber: Sarah M Reviewer: Sadegh Zabihi
(Applause)
At four years old, I started learning piano.
When I turned eight, I began violin and started trumpet at ten.
With a mom who was a piano teacher, and attending a school of the arts
all through elementary school,
I was practicing for at least 15 minutes every night.
Although I hated it then, those 15 minutes
that felt like hours to a five-year-old were helping my brain grow
and develop in a way only possible by playing an instrument.
In today’s world, people are viewed as smart if they go to Harvard
or have multiple degrees at high-end universities.
But instruments make musicians smart in a different way,
a way that I think today's society is really lacking in.
Which is why I think that everyone should learn an instrument.
So what’s this magical way that I’m talking about?
Why should everyone learn an instrument?
Now, don’t get me wrong.
If you sit down and pluck at a guitar for a couple of minutes,
you're not going to become the next Albert Einstein.
What we are going to do is engage both lobes of your brain
and the little bridge in between called the corpus callosum.
Kind of a big jump to science,
but by using your fine motor skills like you do in playing an instrument,
you give that little bridge in your brain an extreme workout.
So what does the bridge do?
Well, that’s what enables you to make connections.
So when a musician works that brain over and over and over again,
with those 15 minutes of practice every day,
they’re enabling their brain
to solve problems faster and more creatively,
to make connections more diversely,
whether that means solving social problems,
environmental problems, all the above,
and enables your brain to look outside the normal solution
to find other ways to arrive upon the answer.
But, why should you care?
Why is making those connections so important
that I think that everybody should learn an instrument?
Well, why don't we just reflect on our world for a minute?
We've got a lot of problems to solve.
And as generations come, we're finding more
and more ways to make life easier, instead of working to make it better.
So, wouldn’t you agree that we need as many problem solvers
and out-of-the-box thinkers as we can get?
Don’t you think that any way
to make more problem solvers should be utilized?
But that’s not the only reason
that I think everyone should learn an instrument.
When I’m learning one of my huge piano pieces,
there are always a couple of painstaking ones
that’s spent learning the piece,
sight-reading and practicing the same sections
over and over and over again.
But once you work through that learning period,
I get to move on to what I like to call the fun part.
That’s when I get to play my piece.
I get to bang out the deep sections.
I get to go light on the keys for all of the light sections,
and I get to decide the message
that I want to put across to my audience when I’m playing.
I get to choose what the composer wanted me to share,
and when I’m doing that,
I am increasing, hugely, the amount of executive function.
So, what is executive function?
Well, it’s probably something that you learned about in homeroom.
Executive function is a set of mental skills
that includes working mental flexibility, grit, and focus.
I think you probably get the point, but again, why does it matter?
Why is executive function so important that everybody should learn an instrument?
Well, take a look at this generation again.
By studies done by Cornell University,
they show that in just eight years,
ADHD diagnosis has increased by more than 30% .
Surveys found that since 1970, the number who feel they have it,
the number of people who feel they have
an extreme problem of procrastination has risen by 20%.
So you tell me, don’t you think
that a way to increase executive function
which includes grit, attention span, focus.
Don’t you think that that should be utilized?
Albert Einstein played the violin.
Mother Teresa played the mandolin.
Martin Luther King played the piano.
So what’s stopping you from picking up an instrument?
(Applause)