It is Time to Pick Up a Guitar: The Benefits of Being a Musician

             Playing an instrument as a child always seemed like a chore. Learning the notes, following the beat, and memorizing chords were tedious and boring tasks. However, as adults, we can appreciate the multiple benefits of our parents forcing us to go to that dreaded piano lesson. Nina Kraus’ lab is researching the positive effects between music training and auditory skills. Connected with this is B.R. Zendel and Alain Claude’s article, “Musicians Experience Less Age-Related Decline in Central Auditory Processing”. In the article, Zendel and Claude test if musicians suffer less age-related decay in their auditory skills.

            Zendel and Claude experimented with pure-tone thresholds, gap-detection threshold, mistuned harmonic detection thresholds, and speech-in-noise thresholds. In this blog, I will focus specifically on the speech-in-noise thresholds. 

Speech-in-noise thresholds vs. Age [Credit: B.R. Zendel and Alain Claude]

In Zendel and Claude’s experiment, he finds that the speech-in-noise thresholds increase slower with age in musicians than nonmusicans. Therefore, an 80-year-old musician will be better able to pick out speech in a noisy restaurant than an 80-year-old nonmusician. Zendel’s conclusions explained why there is slower increase in the threshold. He believes that by frequently practicing an instrument, a person will enhance their cognitive reserve. By enhancing their cognitive reserve, their perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills can concentrate on processing auditory stimuli.  An improved cognitive reserve leads to more successful and flexible ways of thinking during auditory and cognitive tasks. Due to the changes in the ear due to older age, incoming noise is less accurate in the elderly. Therefore, the older adults need to use their cognitive skills to counteract that loss. Musicians have a slower increase in threshold because their enhanced cognitive reserves counteract the loss.

Understanding speech within noise stimulates a complex network within a brain, including the auditory, parietal, and prefrontal cortices. When processing speech in loud areas, older adults show decreased activity in the auditory cortex, but higher activity in the fronto-parietal network. Younger adults do not show this activity. This demonstrates that the adults compensate for the decreased auditory abilities with their cognitive ability. Since musicians can do that better, it makes sense that they are better at processing speech within a noisy background.

Nina Kraus’ work is similar in that she found that musicians across the life span are better at hearing speech in noise. She, however, looks at the musician’s neural responses across the lifetime. She found that the musicians’ neural responses are less deteriorated by noise over their life’s span. She found that by only having one year of musical training, it can reduce the effects of outside noise on the brain. That is why she believes that musicians have better listening abilities in noisy environments.

Musicians vs. Nonmusicians in quiet and noisy environments [Credit: Nina Kraus]

As seen from the neural responses above, noise does not heavily impact a musicians brain. A nonmusician, meanwhile, will have significant disturbance when there is noise as opposed to when there is no noise.

            Overall, Dr. Kraus, Dr. Zendel, and Dr. Claude have unraveled more benefits as to why learning music helps the brain. With this research along with others, hopefully, more and more people will start to pick up instruments from their youth. Also, programs, such as those Dr. Kraus discussed, may be set up in poorer neighborhoods, so that underprivileged children can also reap the benefits of music.