Learning to play musical instrument keeps brains sharp, young and focused: study

By James Gamble via SWNS

Learning to play a musical instrument is the secret to keeping our brains young, according to a new study.

Scientists insist the ability to play music can even make us better listeners as we get older.

The new research, which studied the brains of musicians and non-musicians both young and old, found playing music can help keep our brains 'sharp, young and focused' as we age by exercising and preserving areas of our brains.

The Chinese study discovered long-term musical training could not only delay but even counteract the natural, age-related decline in our ability to listen and keep our minds young.

The incredible findings showed that older musicians can even match the brains of young non-musicians in identifying audiovisual syllables under noisy conditions.

Though the world's population is aging at an unprecedented rate, the study shows there are ways to age healthily and counteract the natural cognitive declines associated with growing older.

In their research, the authors scrutinized the brains of older musicians, older non-musicians and young non-musicians in the neuroimaging study.

The analysis showed that older musicians easily outperformed their non-musician peers and even equaled young people who don't play musical instruments in identifying audiovisual syllables under noisy conditions.

Studying participants' brain activity, the researchers revealed two mechanisms older musicians adopt to counteract aging: functional preservation and functional compensation.

Older musicians were found to retain neural specificity of speech representations in sensorimotor areas at a level similar to those seen in young non-musicians.

Older non-musicians, however, showed degraded neural representations - patterns of brain activity that stand for some environmental feature in the internal workings of the brain.

In the same region of the brain, older musicians also showed higher neural alignment - the degree to which someone's neural representations match those of experts - in comparison to non-musicians far younger than them.

The researchers added that this was down to the older musicians' training intensity.

Additionally, youth-like brain function predicted better audiovisual speech-in-noise perception performance - the ability to process audiovisual speech - in older adults.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, also found that older musicians, compared with their non-musical peers, showed greater activation in frontoparietal regions of the brain which support multiple tasks across domains and greater inhibition in task-irrelevant, default-mode network (DMN) regions that help avoid interference.

The research showed that greater DMN deactivation predicted better audiovisual speech-in-noise performance.

Further, these two mechanisms are interdependent, as greater frontoparietal activation and greater DMN inhibition contributed to more similar neural patterns in sensorimotor regions in older adults.

In other words; functional compensation further supported functional preservation in the brain.

Dr. DU Yi, from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the lead author of the study, said his team's research was proof that playing music keeps our brains young.

"Playing music makes older adults better listeners by preserving youthful neural patterns as well as recruiting additional compensatory brain regions," Dr. Yi said.

"Our study provides empirical evidence to support that playing music keeps your brain sharp, young, and focused."

The team's study provides invaluable insights into adaptive brain reorganization in aging populations, and how lifelong musical training can lead to 'successful aging' in speech processing by preserving youthful brain characteristics and enhancing compensatory brain scaffolding.

The functional preservation of sensorimotor regions along with compensatory DMN deactivation also suggest avenues for more targeted training regimens to protect speech functions in the elderly.