Researchers have published numerous studies about the benefits of studying music. It is touted as a path to academic success, increasing verbal memory and spatial logic skills. (Parents take note: those positive benefits come from consistent daily practice.) While increased intelligence is a nice side effect, I don't believe there are many people who play the piano regularly because it will make them smarter.
Music is a language we start learning at birth. The rise and fall of our voices as we speak is music. The cries of a baby and the squeals of delight are the beginnings of musical communication that precede verbal communication. The music in our voices is what expresses our emotions. Music isolates the emotional aspect of human communication and expands it beyond the limited capabilities of verbal language. Studying music helps us develop a deeper ability to understand and communicate emotional experiences. This deeper connection with ourselves and others is one of the pleasures that keeps us coming back to the piano day after day.
Playing piano stimulates several parts of our mind at once and engages our senses completely. When we play the piano, we are using our sense of touch to feel our way around the keys. We use our proprioceptive sense in feeling our balance on the bench and through the patterns of our fingers on the keys. Our kinesthetic sense helps us to move our fingers and arms with the beat. We use our vision to see patterns on the keys or to read notes on the staff. While doing all of that, we are using our working memory to keep a beat, recognize rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns. We must use our imaginations to know what sound we want to make next while using our auditory sense to listen to the sounds we are making and adjusting our technique. All this time, we are in touch with some story, picture or feeling we wish to communicate. It is no wonder that music forges new connections in the brain and helps us succeed in many areas of our lives! Above all, the incredibly stimulating nature of musical performance is what makes it so innately challenging yet pleasurable.
Helping students discover the innate pleasure in learning music is what I build my teaching around. I want my students to find their own internal motivation to play and encourage them to find the music that speaks to them. When this personal connection to the music is missing, practicing the piano becomes a chore or a means to an end, but when students feel a personal connection to their music, practicing piano becomes a pleasure.