Music Training and Nonmusical Abilities

Narrative review of the correlational, experimental and genetically informative literatures on music training and non-musical abilities

Children and adults across the music-training literature

Included for a reason peculiar to this topic: the lead author is the man who published "Music Lessons Enhance IQ" in 2004 and is now its most careful critic, which makes this the closest thing the field has to a disinterested summary. Graded C as a narrative review - it produces no pooled estimate and its judgements are arguments, not data. Its value to the archive is that it reads the strongest observational finding in the field (Guhn et al. 2020, n = 112,916) as selection rather than causation, from an author with every professional incentive to read it the other way.

The review's bottom line: "we conclude that the evidence that music training causes nonmusical benefits is weak or nonexistent, and that researchers routinely overemphasize contributions from experience while neglecting those from nature." On the population-level Canadian study it says: "high-functioning individuals appear to do well in school and to take music lessons, and their intellectual advantages may grow larger over time. The same interpretation can explain associations that were evident in a sample of more than 100,000 high school students." The review assembles the alternative account the archive uses - preexisting music aptitude, general cognitive ability, personality and family background jointly predict who takes lessons and who does well - and notes that the associations that survive covariate adjustment are precisely the ones where the covariate for aptitude was missing.

The review's central claim IS the genetic confound: nature is systematically underweighted relative to experience in this literature. It marshals the twin, adoption and molecular evidence (music aptitude heritability, instrument engagement heritability, beat- synchronisation GWAS) as the explanation for correlations that training cannot explain.

Not applicable to a review. It does not engage Román-Caballero et al. (2022) or Jamey et al. (2024) at the level of reanalysis, so it should not be treated as an answer to the strongest positive syntheses - only as the most authoritative statement of the sceptical position.