Learning a Musical Instrument May Protect Your Brain as You Age

Musical training may protect your brain. Scientists have found evidence that learning a musical instrument when you're younger can prevent decay in speech listening skills later in life.

Our cognitive abilities diminish with age, and one of these abilities is being able to comprehend speech. This difficulty can actually occur even in the absence of measurable hearing loss. In fact, previous research has confirmed that the brain's central auditory system, which supports the ability to parse, sequence and identify acoustic speech, weakens in later years.

In this case, though, researchers decided to see how formal musical training might impact this decline. They examined 20 healthy older adults between the ages of 55 and 75. A total of 10 of these adults were musicians and 10 were non-musicians. These adults put on headphones and were asked to identify random speech sounds.

During the testing, the researchers also recorded the neural activity of each participants using electroencephalography (EEG). This revealed how the brain makes sense of our complex acoustical environment.

"Musical activities are an engaging form of cognitive brain training and we are now seeing robust evidence of brain plasticity from musical training not just in younger brains, but in older brains too," said Gavin Bidelman, the study leader, in a news release. "In our study we were able to predict how well older people classify or identify speech using EEG imaging. We saw a brain-behavior response that was two to three times better in the older musicians compared to non-musicians peers. In other words, old musicians' brains provide a much more detailed, clean and accurate depiction of the speech signal, which is likely why they are much more sensitive and better at understanding speech."

The researchers found that musicians' brains were able to process speech better than those who were non-musicians. This, in turn, shows that learning a musical instrument could be important for ensuring better cognitive abilities and preventing decline later in life.

The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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