Study: Musical training has biological impact on aging

northbrook.suntimes.com

Good news for music lovers: A Northwestern study has found age-related delays in automatic brain responses can be avoided or offset with musical training.

Researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage over non-musicians, according a release from Northwestern.

“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus said in the release. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”

A researcher for the study said the results supported the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.

Previous studies conducted by the lab suggested musical training also offsets losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise — two common complaints of older adults, the release said.

However, Kraus warned the current study’s findings were not pervasive and do not demonstrate that musicians have a neural timing advantage in every neural response to sounds. Instead, she said, the study showed the musical experience selectively affected the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another.

The study involved 87 normal-hearing, native English-speaking adults being measured as they watched a captioned video.