Life Skills from Learning to Play an Instrument?

There is little question about whether learning to play an instrument is beneficial, but the benefits may last longer than some think.  Those of us that do learn how to play an instrument, learn at a relatively young age. There are many studies that talk about a special age range, where children are more capable of learning new information.  It takes a lot for a person to become somewhat proficient at playing an instrument, and even so there is no universal standard to determine whether someone is proficient. Yet how the brain responds to music and the skills learned with playing an instrument can carry on into adulthood regardless if they have stopped playing an instrument.

In a New York Times article Early Music Lessons Have Longtime Benefits, they discuss how people are able to pick out specific components of music. Old musicians are able to do this better than non-musicians of the same age, because the process is dependent on the brain and not hearing capabilities. This can also be described as the cocktail party effect, where people are able discern the words that someone is speaking from background noise. Dr. Gary Marcus, in his book Guitar Zero, mentions that a perceptual skill to be a good musician is to differentiate relative pitches and intervals. Dr. Marcus tries using an iPhone app to help learn musical intervals, which only plays one beat in isolation. He then realizes that for actual songs a musician needs to pick out a single interval from multiple ones that are being played at the same time.

The New York Times article also mentions researchers at the University of California, San Francisco that are trying to find parts in a person's genome that indicate the ability to hear absolute pitch, by means of early musical training. Dr Marcus refers to brain imaging studies that indicate that instead of genomic region, that multiple parts of the brain work together in response to music. Parts of the brain that are specific to language and hearing, among others areas, are both active when listening to music, but there is no single region the acts more so than others in reaction to music. Dr. Marcus believes that musical talent is completely trained and developed, and that no one is born with any natural talent.

Musical training can benefit the brain in many ways. Yet it is not the only way the brain can be molded. With constant exposure to certain stimuli the brain can adapt to better perform processes fast and more efficiently.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/early-music-lessons-have-longtime-benefits/