Can playing a musical instrument slow aging?

By Stephen Beech

Playing a musical instrument slows the aging process, according to a new study.

Older musicians showed a "youthful" pattern of brain activity during speech perception tests.

Scientists say the findings indicate that long-term musical training may "mitigate" the age-related decline in speech perception by making it easier for older people to understand what others are saying in noisy places.

They explained that normal aging is usually associated with declines in sensory and cognitive functions.

Those age-related changes in perception and cognition are often accompanied by increased neural activity and functional connectivity – the statistical dependence of activity between different brain regions – in widely distributed neural networks.

The research team says that positive lifestyle choices - such as musical training, higher levels of education, and bilingualism - contribute to cognitive and brain reserve, which represents the accumulation of cognitive and neural resources before the onset of age-related brain changes.

Cognitive Reserve Theory suggests that the reserve gathered through experience and training can help reduce the impact of age-related brain decline, leading to better-than-expected cognitive performance.

But how cumulative reserves influenced by positive lifestyle factors affect neural activity in older people remains controversial.

To investigate, researchers in Canada and China used MRI scans to measure brain activity in 25 older musicians, 25 older non-musicians, and 24 young non-musicians who were asked to identify syllables masked by noise sounds.

The team focused on neural responses within the auditory dorsal stream, which includes auditory, inferior parietal, dorsal frontal motor, and frontal motor areas, supporting sound-to-action mapping and sensorimotor integration during speech processing.

As predicted, the results revealed reduced age-related declines in speech-in-noise performance among older musicians compared to older non-musicians.

During speech-in-noise perception, the older non-musicians showed the typical age-related compensatory increase in functional connectivity in auditory dorsal streams in both hemispheres of the brain.

But older musicians exhibited a connectivity pattern in bilateral auditory dorsal streams that resembled young non-musicians, with connectivity strength in the right dorsal stream correlating with speech-in-noise perception.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS Biology, also showed that older musicians exhibited a more youth-like spatial pattern of functional connectivity during the task.

But older non-musicians consistently showed a spatial pattern that deviated from young non-musicians.

Taken together, the research team says the findings support the “Hold-Back Upregulation” hypothesis, which posits that cognitive reserve from musical training promotes a more youthful functional connectivity pattern.

Dr. Claude Alain, of the Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, Canada, said: "Beyond merely compensating for age-related declines, cognitive reserve may work by maintaining the integrity and functional architecture of neural networks, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of aging on cognitive performance."

But he said that, due to the study design, it was not possible to determine cause-and-effect relationships between musical training and performance in the perception task.

Dr. Lei Zhang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said: “A positive lifestyle helps older adults cope better with cognitive aging, and it is never too late to take up, and stick with, a rewarding hobby such as learning an instrument."

Study co-author Dr. Yi Du, also of CAS, added: “Just like a well-tuned instrument doesn’t need to be played louder to be heard, the brains of older musicians stay finely tuned thanks to years of training.

"Our study shows that this musical experience builds cognitive reserve, helping their brains avoid the usual age-related overexertion when trying to understand speech in noisy places.”

The research team says their findings may help develop interventions aimed at preserving brain function and improving communication in older people.