Conclusions and considerations Results from brain research and neurobiological findings can hardly induce immediate applications and recommendations for music education and music learning. Empirical data cannot be directly transferred to educational practice because scientific descriptions are essentially different from educational prescriptions. Empirical data are based upon objective facts and verifiable procedures; scientific research is committed to objectivity, reliability and validity. Judgements in education, however, are value judgements to a large degree. Normative decisions on values can never deduced objectively from empirical descriptions. As Howard Gardner puts it: "We could know what every neuron does and we would not be one step closer to knowing how to educate our children," because "the chasm between 'is' and 'ought' is unbridgeable" (1999, 60, 79). No doubt, mental representation has become a key notion of the cognitive revolution during the decade of brain (Gardner 1999). Therefore, a possible application to music education necessarily refers to mental representations. However, as already mentioned, education is based on decisions that are grounded on underlying value judgements which deal with "what" and "why" to teach; but findings in neurobiology may indicate new ways of "how" to teach. Rather, teaching interacts with dispositions and potentials given to each individual. Although neurobiological findings cannot tell us why to teach music of a particular culture and what to select from the broad variety of musical traditions, empirical findings can advise us of how and when to teach so that mind and memory, perception and cognition can be developed most efficiently. From that perspective, we may conclude from neurobiology of cognition and learning: (1) Learning is the process by which one develops and incrementally differentiates mental representations. Therefore, music learning focuses on the development of genuine musical representations. (2) Procedural knowledge (knowing how) is more appropriate in music cognition than formal declarative knowledge (knowing about). Immanent musical properties (pulse, meter, tonality, intervals, motifs, contours etc.) are represented by neuronal connections that are activated through aural stimulation. And the other way around, these musical entities can only be articulated in singing or playing if developed as mental representations. Conscious activation in mind is called "audiation" (Gordon 1980). It takes place when neuronal representations are activated in thinking, listening or "musicing" (Elliott 1995). (3) This calls for the idea of teaching music musically (Gruhn 1997, Swanwick 1999), i.e. to advance those teaching strategies and learning modes that promote the development of genuine musical representations by priming an aural-oral loop. (4) Genuine musical representations appear to be contradictory to transfer effects. As demonstrated, music has a strong effect on the brain, but there is little evidence that music learning automatically affects other cognitive skills. (5) The same reluctance is well suited for simple lateralization effects in music. Music is always processed in both hemispheres, but performs an asymmetric predominance depending on the applied cognitive strategy (global versus local, verbal versus procedural). Therefore, music teaching and learning should take into consideration that different strategies engage different brain areas and develop stronger connections. The more interconnected these areas are, the more stable representations can be attained. (6) Research on patients with mental (brain) disorders clearly demonstrates that musical abilities are uncorrelated to other domains of cognitive development. Individuals rather form a domain specific intelligence profile. Music education should stress on those domain specific potentials instead of hoping for transfer effects which reasonably may be applied in therapy. Music education should rather develop the given musical aptitude to the highest possible level. The tremendous progress in brain research gives rise to investigating more aspects of music learning in a more sophisticated way and, therefore, we may expect new insights into neuronal developments and cognitive effects related to music learning.