Last week we asked our readers to answer a poll on Which activities are likely to improve performance in school?

Most of our readers answered c and d which are the correct answers.

Learning to play a musical instrument.

One of the most persistent brain myths is that playing classical music to babies increases their intelligence. There’s on scientific evidence for this idea, but it’s proven to be very persistent because it’s allowed parents to address their anxiety about their children’s intellectual development.

While playing classical music for your kids isn’t likely to improve their brain development, having them play music for you will.

Children who learn to play a musical instrument have better spatial reasoning skills than those who don’t take music lessons.

Filling your house with music may indeed improve your children’s intelligence as long as they aren’t passive consumers, but active producers.

Taking breaks from studying to play video games.

The brain is trained to handle multitasking. Sustained practice at multistasking increases one’s ability to pay attention to many things at the same time and playing video games is a major source of practice, especially the kinds where the aim is to shoot as many enemies as possible before they shoot you. These types of games require players to distribute attention across the screen and quickly detect and react to events.

While encouraging your kids to play shoot em’ up action games doesn’t sound like a good idea, at least parents can take heart that video game playing is good for children.

A recent report also found that playing video games is good for eyesight.

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