Talkative types

Concert pianists aren’t just brilliant at playing the piano– they may well be gifted linguists too. Research by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) has revealed that children who play the piano for six months or more tend to show a greater ability to detect the sounds of consonants, vowels and pitch than their non-playing peers. No improvement on IQ, attention span or memory was shown, though.