Learning music can be beneficial
While clearing a wardrobe in his mother’s house, 21-year-old Jacques Ruffin came across a letter written by the owner of their local music store. He decided to share it on the online message board Reddit, where it received a hugely favourable response.
Jacques’ mother had rented a trumpet for her young son. When she met with financial difficulties she’d told Mr Jones, the shop owner, that she’d become unable to make further payments. “You do not have to pay me any more for the trumpet,” he’d replied. “It is yours to play.”
Mr Jones may not have realised fully the generosity of his gift. Research shows learning to play a musical instrument confers a huge range of benefits.
Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego concludes that, because there is overlap between the areas in our brain that process music and those that process speech, learning to play an instrument is likely to be associated with better reading skills and advanced linguistic comprehension.
Adrian Hille and Jurgen Schupp at the German Institute for Economic Research found that musically-trained adolescents had better school grades, and were more conscientious, open-minded and ambitious, while Anthony Shook and colleagues at Northwestern University created a complex artificial “language” and challenged participants with varying degrees of musical experience to learn it. The most skilled musicians learned faster and were more accurate when tested on what they’d learned.
Overall, musical training – pariclary when taken up before the age of seven – is linked to greater plasticity in the brain, making it easier to acquire a wide range of skills.
Research by Laurel Trainor at McMaster University led her to conclude that “the adult brain is also open to change”. Learning an instrument in adulthood has been shown by researchers to be associated with increased aural acuity, greater self-confidence, and enhanced recovery of motor control after suffering a stroke.
Finally, one of the most encouraging findings is that individuals are likely to maintain cognitive flexibility even if their musical training doesn’t continue into adulthood. Travis White-Schwoch and col- leagues at Northwestern point out that delays in processing fast-changing speech, especially in noisy environments, are often assumed to be an inevitable part of ageing. This needn’t be the case, however. Their research showed that adults who’d had music training in early life, preferably for more than four years – even if they’d then not played a musical instrument for over four decades – didn’t show the expected delays in neural timing.
You do not have to pay me any more for the trumpet. It is yours to play