In addition to its ability to affect mood, music can be a powerful cognitive and cerebral stimulant. This is particularly true of children, who are encouraged to play an instrument from an early age.
As it turns out, those who do may enjoy long-term benefits as playing music has positive effects on the development and preservation of their cognitive capacities throughout their lives.
Researchers at Universities of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier in Scotland have investigated the benefits of playing a musical instrument from childhood. They found that musicians perform better on cognitive assessment tests than those who never played an instrument in their lives.
This suggests a link between musical practice in childhood and improved cognitive ability in later life.
To reach this conclusion, the research team asked 420 octogenarians from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 to take tests assessing their processing speed, visuospatial reasoning, communication skills, and verbal memory every three years, between the ages of 70 and 82.
Of these participants, 167 had played a musical instrument in childhood or adolescence, and 39 were still doing so at the age of 82.
This was how the scientists discovered the existence of a small but detectable association between playing an instrument and improved cognitive abilities in later life. And this was true even when other factors were taken into account, such as the volunteers’ cognitive ability at age 11, socioeconomic status, levels of education, or physical well-being in adulthood.
According to study co-author Dr Judith Okely, a lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, these findings show just how much learning music sculpts the brain over the long term.
“We see these results as an exciting starting point for further investigation into how musical experience from across the life course might contribute to healthy ageing,” she said.
This research, published in the journal “Psychology and Aging”, follows on from a previous study on the virtues of playing an instrument at any age. However, it does not prove with certainty that playing an instrument systematically improves one’s cognitive skills.
Nevertheless, playing a musical instrument appears to be an activity that stimulates the brain. It could even help to combat the effects of cognitive ageing, even in adults who take up the art late in life.
Indeed, the most recent discoveries show that the practice stimulates almost all forms of memory, including in Alzheimer’s sufferers – all the more reason to get a musical instrument into everyone’s hands.