It’s exciting to hear about a new study showing the benefits of music lessons.
There have been a lot of them over the years that have proven over and over again how much learning a musical instrument can improve your life.
This time, the researchers found that it is the secret to keeping your brain young!
Benefits of Music Lessons: Keeps Your Brain Young!
Published April 26, 2023 in the scientific journal Science Advances, the study involved older musicians, older nonmusicians, and young nonmusicians.
Researchers had each group identify noise-masked audiovisual syllables, which simply means that they had to figure out what words they were hearing amidst a lot of background noise.
The results showed that older musicians easily outperformed their non-musician peers when it came to determining what the words were.
Even more exciting—the older musicians did so well that they equaled the young non-musicians in their accomplishments.
The researchers used brain imaging (like MRI scans) to watch brain activity during these tests, and found that the older musicians had more brain activity across certain areas of the brain than their non-musician peers, and that the activity was equal to the younger non-musicians.
In summary, the findings showed that early-age musical training—such as which occurs in music lessons—helped keep these participants’ brains sharp, young, and focused, even as they got older.
Music Lessons Preserve Brain Health
Lead study author Dr. DU Yi, from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, noted that his team’s research was proof that playing music keeps our brains young.
“Playing music makes older adults better listeners,” he said, “by preserving youthful neural patterns as well as recruiting additional compensatory brain regions.”
It’s true that as we age, one of the difficulties we can encounter is determining what other people are saying in noisy environments. Even in people with normal hearing, this can get harder as they get older.
This study shows that the normal age-related decline in this type of hearing perception can be mitigated by musical training.
It’s Never Too Late to Learn a Musical Instrument
Though this study focused on the effects of musical training at a younger age (usually, when participants were still in school), there’s no doubt that musical training can help improve your brainpower no matter when you start taking lessons.
I’ve noticed the improvements in older musicians in my own studio, and there are studies to back me up.
In 2021, for instance, researchers published a study detailing their experiments with older adults aged 61-85 years old. They assigned one group to 4 months of music lessons on the keyboard or harmonica. The other control group did not receive any training.
The results showed that those who took music lessons improved their memory performance on cognitive tests compared to the control group. Brain scans also showed that they experienced more brain activation resulting in improved neural efficiency.
“Our results indicate that the musical instrument training program may contribute to improvements in verbal memory and neural efficiency in novice older adults,” the researchers wrote.
The bottom line: If you want a healthier, more active brain no matter what age you are, take music lessons!