Learning music is good for our brains…but start early!
Learning to play an instrument is a lot like learning a foreign language; the earlier you begin studying the easier it is to learn. However, as challenging as it may be, learning to play an instrument is a wonderful opportunity as we age to address the “use it or lose it” principle. Reseach has clearly indicated that new learning is good for our brain, it can delay the onset of dementia in some case and contribute to over all well-being.
Here are a few of the details from a recent study out of Northwestern University published in April’s Natural Neuroscience.
Music training
Twenty adults took part in the study. Half were amateur musicians who had at least six years of continuous musical instrument training startingbefore age 12. (On average, the musicians had nearly 11 years of music lessons.) The other half had less than three years of music training (just over one year on average). All were native English speakers with no knowledge of Mandarin, a tone language.
In tone languages, a single syllable can differ in meaning depending on pitch patterns, or tones. “Mi” delivered in a level tone means “to squint”; in a rising tone it means “to bewilder”; and in a falling-then-rising tone it means “rice.” (English, by contrast, uses pitch only for intonation, as when rising pitch is used to signify a question.)The researchers piped the three Mandarin “mi” sounds into a subject’s ear as he watched a movie and listened to its soundtrack with the other ear. Electrodes attached to his scalp measured and graphed the accuracy of his brainstem ability to track the differently pitched sounds.Even with their attention focused on the movie, the musicians were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians, the researchers found.
The study suggests a bigger role for the brainstem, a primitive structure at the base of the brain that was believed to be unchangeable and uninvolved in complex processing such as music and language. The research does not prove definitively that early musical training is what leads to a sharper sensory system. Because of the design of the study, it’s possible that the subjects who stuck with their childhood music lessons were born with some ability that made playing music easier or more enjoyable.
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