
20/08/2025
Early music exposure helps infants build critical brain connections. 🎶🧠
Yes, music literally helps build and strengthen an infant's brain.
New research shows that playing music to very premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can significantly boost their brain development, particularly in areas tied to emotional and social processing.
Scientists found that music exposure helped speed up the maturation of brain regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and temporal pole—areas that are vital for understanding emotions and integrating sensory information.
These findings highlight how music can stimulate important neural pathways during a critical window of brain development.
The study also found that preterm babies who listened to music formed stronger connections between key brain networks involved in emotion, attention, and sensory processing. Notably, infants who received music exposure in the NICU showed brain responses and emotional development closer to those of full-term babies months later. With up to 25% of preterm infants at risk for social and emotional difficulties, these results suggest that early musical intervention may be a powerful and low-cost tool to support healthy development in the most vulnerable newborns.
the paper
T.C. Zhao, & P.K. Kuhl, Musical intervention enhances infants’ neural processing of temporal structure in music and speech, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113 (19) 5212-5217,