Adults and Music Education: Your Brain Can Benefit From Music Classes Too

Many research studies have shown that children who take music classes benefit from an increase in cognitive skills and intellectual development. Can adults reap these same rewards? Researchers believe that they can, even if they have never picked up an instrument before. What’s better, however, is an early childhood music education that offers rewards into the future. So, if your parents encouraged you to play piano or violin as a kid, you’re further along than your non-playing middle-aged peers.

Adults who have taken music lessons as a child, or who pick up the guitar or flute or similar in their later years, have added defense against conditions that lead to memory loss and cognitive decline due to age. A number of studies show that music education for children who will eventually become adults, and for adults who take up the practice, provides necessary fuel to fight reduced ability to distinguish consonants and speak words.

Music Lessons Helps Aging Brains

Playing a music instrument brings significant improvements in the brain that last into the golden years, even if there has been a span of non-music playing time. This is because music training has a profound and lasting influence on the brain, helping it create neural connections that can remain for decades. Even as cognition declines, the amount of time spent practicing music - and therefore practicing coordination and motor control - can help boost the brain and compensate for reduced function due to age. The hours of time that involve reading music, and listening to music with the intention of replicating it, also contribute to enhanced brain connections that stay with a person for the long term.

Music Training’s Effect on the Brain

A 2003 Harvard Study done by neurologist Gottfried Schlaug showed that adult professional musicians’ brains had more gray matter than non-musicians’ brains. Schlaug, along with his colleagues, found that the brain’s structure actually changes in relation to auditory and motor improvements - after only 15 months of music training during childhood. A map of the brain was also looked at in terms of white matter, in similar studies. Research findings indicated that the brain’s ability to adapt or change in response to experience, or behavior or the environment, was increased due to musical training in subject individuals.

Cognitive Function Increases the Longer You Played - Or Play

Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, conducted a study in 2011 that focused on music education and adult neuropsychological ability. Hanna-Pladdy divided a group of 70 healthy adults, aged 60 to 83, into 3 groups: musicians with at least 10 years experience playing an instrument, those with 1 to 9 years experience with an instrument, and a control group that lacked the ability to read music or any type of music training. Each participant in these groups took a comprehensive battery of tests that would provide neuropsychological information, and hopefully substantiating data, in favor of receiving a music education. After the tests, the group with more than 10 years of music training scored highest in subject areas like visuospatial memory, nonverbal memory, absorbing new information, and naming objects. As a comparison, the group without prior music education performed least well on the tests. Those who had played from 1 to 9 years ranked in the middle.

From the study, we can gather that the longer a person plays a musical instrument, the more cognitive and intellectual benefits they receive later in life. Interestingly, the test subjects did not lose their benefits even if they hadn’t picked up an instrument in more than 10 or 20 years.

Masters Institute of Music believes in the power of music education, for kids and adults, to change the brain and rewire it so it functions optimally throughout a lifetime. We’re thrilled to provide music education for our New Jersey community, and we hope that you’ll join us in our celebration of music as brain fuel. To find out more about our Institute, please feel free to visit us in person, email us or give us a call. We have much music information and enjoyment to share with you and your children.