Playing Musical Instruments Can Rejuvenate Brain Age, According to Study

Playing music on an instrument as you get older may help keep your aging brain young, a new study has found.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) research team included 25 elderly people who played music with musical instruments (average age 65.1 years, 11 women), 25 elderly people who did not play music (average age 66.6 years, 16 women), and non-playing music. We analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of three groups of 24 young adults (average age 23.1 years, 12 females).

The participant was healthy, had no neurological disorders, and had normal hearing in both ears. All passed the Beijing version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test. The old man who plays music has been steadily training to play music with an instrument for the past three years. Those who did not play music had, on average, less than two years of experience in music education.

As a result of the study, it was found that the ‘brain age’ defined by the machine learning algorithm of the elderly who played music was much younger than that of the non-music-playing elderly and similar to that of a non-music-playing 20-year-old. The elderly who played music had a much better cognitive function of identifying sounds and syllables in a noisy environment than the elderly who did not play music, and were like young people who did not play.

Among age-related cognitive impairments, difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments is one of the most common symptoms. Elderly people with good hearing for their age can also experience these symptoms.

“This study supports the idea that playing music preserves neural patterns in youth and strengthens brain regions responsible for reward, making older people’s brains sharper, younger, and more focused,” said study lead author Du Yi, head of the CAS Psychology Institute. do,” he said.

The results of this study (Successful aging of musicians: Preservation of sensorimotor regions aids audiovisual speech-in-noise perception) were published in the international journal Science Advances.