Music will keep the brain young

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Many of us, being at school age, under pressure from our parents, studied music. Some people still tremble at their daily violin or piano lessons. But in fact, you need to rejoice in this and, moreover, try to continue your music studies if you want to keep your brain youthful as long as possible.

As a rule, with age, a person begins to react worse to stimuli from the outside: elderly people have difficulty distinguishing individual sounds among street noise and, when addressing them, cannot immediately give an answer. Moreover, in this case, we are not talking about ordinary deafness, but about slowdowns in the work of human nerve cells. It is believed that such inhibition of the process of transmission and processing of signals by neurons is an inevitable consequence of brain aging. However, American researchers from Northwestern University have found a very unexpected method to prevent aging of the brain - playing music.

The study involved 87 well-hearing volunteers who speak English since childhood. Scientists referred to musicians as those people who began to study music before the age of 9 and continued their activities until the beginning of the study. All those participants who have been engaged in music in one form or another for less than three years were ranked as "non-musicians".

It turned out that adult and elderly musicians had a significant advantage over ordinary peers - their brains worked faster and their hearing was better. In terms of sound recognition, they were not inferior to young "non-musicians".

“These data show us again how the perception of sounds throughout our lives affects the development of some functions of our nervous system,” says one of the participants in the work, neuroscientist Nina Kraus (Nina Kraus).

Apparently, music somehow contributes to the preservation of the plasticity of neurons, the ability to form new synapses and prevents the disintegration of already formed connections, writes globalscience.ru. Although the authors of the study themselves are not yet entirely sure that music practice has an impact on any perception of sound. Scientists note that in older musicians, nerve cells respond best to specific elements of sounds, which make it possible to distinguish between consonances.