“New Study Shows Playing an Instrument or Singing can Keep the Brain Young”

Singing along on the radio, blasting out a nice sonata on the piano, it’s not just for entertainment, your brain also benefits from it. New research shows that playing an instrument or singing keeps the brain young and vital.

It prevents aging, improves neural plasticity and maintains brain functions. And this certainly applies to the elderly, according to one new Chinese study. More precisely, playing a musical instrument or singing regularly and for a long time makes people on average a lot better at speech recognition at an older age. They are able to ignore unrelated information (noise) and understand an audiovisual message better than seniors who do not participate in music training. MRI scans show that different parts of the brain look younger and even take over functions of other areas. In this way, years of music training can slow down and in some cases even reverse cognitive decline.

Audiovisual test
Chinese professor Yi Du docks Scientias.nl explains how the study came about: “We recruited three different types of test subjects: older musicians (started with musical training before the age of 23 and have been a musician for an average of 51 years), older non-musicians and young non-musicians. All of these people were asked to take an audiovisual test while lying in an MRI scanner. On screen they saw someone pronounce a syllable, the lip movements were clearly visible on the screen. The sound could also be heard, but was considerably disturbed by noise. The subjects’ task was to name the spoken syllables. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘signal-to-noise-ratio‘ strong.”

Benefits of music training
The brain scans baffled the researchers. “Some of our findings surprised us, despite our prior assumptions,” Yi Du continues. “We formulated three hypotheses about the benefits of music training for the aging brain. We looked at the degree of preservation of brain functions in certain parts of the brain – how ‘youthful’ are these brain areas still? – and we looked at neuronal compensation, where one brain region takes over the functions of another region. Third, we looked for a positive effect due to a combination of or interaction between these two mechanisms. And we found evidence in our study that confirms the third hypothesis,” says Yi Du.

Use it or lose it
“It seemed logical to us beforehand that we would see better preservation of brain functions in all brain regions of the frontal and parietal cortex responsible for cognitive control. However, the MRI scans showed that this could also be found in the sensorimotor areas, which play a role in the perception of speech in young people. So it seems that for this ‘use it or lose it’-principle applies,” explains the researcher. “In addition, we found neuronal compensation in parts of the Default Mode Network (DMN). This suggests that music training improves our ability to ignore ‘background noise’ (non-task related information) and focus on a specific task. So it seems very likely that the benefits of music training are much broader than what we tested in our research. Music training seems to improve the overall state of the brain, a surprising and promising idea,” says Du enthusiastically.

The two mechanisms appeared to complement each other. “The most fascinating thing to me is that the two mechanisms – the maintenance of brain function and neuronal compensation – co-exist and are dependent on each other. In other words, the functional compensation seen in the frontal and parietal cortex and the DMN has a positive influence on the sensorimotor regions. This means that music training affects our cognitive abilities and our brain in a more complex way than previously thought,” said the Chinese scientist.

Never too late to start making music
The researcher is very positive about the anti-aging effects of making music. “I firmly believe that music training is an important and entertaining way to improve speech recognition and prevent brain aging. That’s why I encourage all the elderly to start playing a musical instrument or singing, if they haven’t already done so. This keeps the brain sharp, focused and young.”

She has even convinced her family and friends to take up music for the sake of mental sharpness. “For example, my father started playing the erhu, a traditional Chinese instrument, after I told him about our findings. He also shared this tip with his friends and thus made several elderly people enthusiastic about music training,” concludes Du.