Despite mastering the tonal nuances of the flutophone as a sixth grader, I’ve never mustered any enthusiasm for learning to play a musical instrument in the years that followed. It’s not that I lacked the opportunity. There was that harmonica that fell into my possession sometime in my 20s and the upright, untuned piano my brother foisted upon me and my young family in my 40s, but my tepid attempts to produce a melody from either of these instruments proved futile.
This set me apart from the other members of my family. For years, My Lovely Wife played the cello, my daughter could coax a tune from a clarinet or violin, and my son could elicit a pleasant riff from his guitar. None of their musical initiative or talent rubbed off on me, a fact that hadn’t raised the slightest concern until I stumbled upon recent research that now has me wondering whether my cognitive faculties may suffer as a result.
A study published last week in PLOS Biology suggests that older adults who continue to play music into their later years reap particular cognitive rewards that elude their nonmusical counterparts. All that music making apparently reinforces their brains against the neurological erosion that typically accompanies old age.
Yi Du, PhD, a psychology professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and her research team recruited 74 volunteers and divided them into groups of older musicians, older nonmusicians, and younger nonmusicians. To determine cognitive performance, the team used MRI monitoring to measure the response of the auditory dorsal stream in the brains of participants while they identified syllables that were masked by noise. The results were noteworthy: The older musicians displayed a level of focused neural connectivity similar to the younger participants, while older nonmusicians showed all the typical age-related connectivity issues.
“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,” Du explains. “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.”
Still, she acknowledges that the study’s results suggest only an association between long-term musical proclivity and a younger, healthier brain. They don’t necessarily prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
Du’s research builds on a study published in 2023 out of the University of Geneva, which suggests that it’s never too late to take up an instrument — or simply listen to music on a regular basis — in an effort to maintain some cognitive coherence as we grow old.
For that research, Clara James, PhD, and her colleagues assembled 132 healthy older adults between the ages of 62 and 78 who were not musically inclined. Half of the volunteers were enrolled in piano lessons, while the other half attended classes devoted to active music listening and analysis. Six months later, researchers found that all participants displayed increased volumes of gray matter in four areas of the brain associated with working memory and high-level cognitive functioning.
There was a significant caveat, however: There was no improvement in the part of the brain devoted to sound processing. The practicing pianists exhibited a stable amount of gray matter in that region, while the active-listening group showed some shrinkage. “In addition,” notes lead study author Damien Marie, PhD, “a global brain pattern of atrophy was present in all participants. Therefore, we cannot conclude that musical interventions rejuvenate the brain. They only prevent aging in specific regions.”
That’s no small thing, of course; the aging brain needs all the help it can get. But those studies aren’t going to persuade me to reacquaint myself with the flutophone. It would really annoy MLW, for one thing. Plus, there’s always some flotsam floating around in the current of scientific knowledge that will allow me to rationalize almost any behavior.
In this case, I’ll cozy up with the results of a 2020 study of older Taiwanese adults that found “those with higher reading frequencies were less likely to have cognitive decline.” I’ve enjoyed an after-dinner reading ritual for nearly 20 years. And sometimes I even listen to music while I turn the pages.
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