Want a Healthier Brain That Defies Aging? Do This

The researchers from Yale made it clear that this doesn't necessarily mean we're about to have an dementia epidemic, but it is alarming enough to study further. 

I'm not a scientist, but I can't help but wonder if our smartphones have something to do with it. I've written about this, but I went several weeks without a phone in September, and I was amazed at how productive I suddenly was, how much better I was able to concentrate on daily tasks, and how I even picked up old hobbies again, like reading several books in a short period of time. Knowing what I know now, I wish I'd gotten out my old music books. I might still. 

As it turns out, playing a musical instrument may be one of the healthiest things you can do, as it engages almost every single part of your brain. Even listening to music can do wonders for the magnificent organ. Maybe that's why Albert Einstein once said, "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music."   

First of all — and if you are a music person, you probably already know this — engaging with music is good for your overall mental health and well-being. Simply listening to it can help reduce stress, anxiety, and depression; calm your mind; and even improve your mood. Some research has shown that it can even help people battle substance abuse, and music therapy has helped many overcome trauma, especially children who can have difficulty processing their emotions. Learning to play an instrument can do all of this, too, but it takes things to the next level. 

When scientists study the brain, they often have their subjects perform tasks while hooked to various machines, like an fMRI or PET scanners. This allows them to see how brain responds to the task at hand. When you read a chapter in a book, one part of your brain lights up. When you do a math problem, another does. 

According to Dr. Anita Collins, when you listen to music, multiple parts of your brain light up or scientists "see fireworks" as she puts it. "Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once, as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into unified musical experience," she said. 

When the same scientists have tested actual musicians who played instruments, those "backyard fireworks became a jubilee" she said. She also called it the brain's version of a full-body workout: "Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices."  

Here's more: 

The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision, in which the left hemisphere is more involved, with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively, in both academic and social settings.

Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians often have higher levels of executive function, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And, indeed, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions, creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag, like a good Internet search engine.

According to Collins, scientists have yet to find any other single activity that does that. 

A 2009 study out of the University of Zurich found that children who play instruments have higher IQs than those who don't. A 2007 study found that  "a professional musician's auditory cortex has up to 130 percent more gray matter and 102 percent more activity than non-musicians." You don't even have to be that good at it. Even amateur musicians have up to 32% more brain activity than the average person. And once upon a time, a professor named Steven Mithen, who had no musical talent, took singing lessons for a year. His brain scans showed increased activity in several areas.  

A 2014 study found that "musical training in childhood not only enhances many cognitive functions but is accompanied by neuroplastic changes in brain structure and function." But wait, there's good news for those of us who aren't still children. That same study found that, "although this influence appears to be strongly potentiated when musical training takes place during sensitive periods, we have given some examples that music-induced brain plasticity does occur also later in life." 

And yet another study concluded that "musicians appear to be less susceptible to age-related degenerations in the brain." Another found "playing an instrument to be significantly associated with less likelihood of dementia and cognitive impairment." 

Just don't look at our current crop of aging rock stars as proof — none of these studies suggested that playing an instrument was strong enough to combat the effects of decades of drug and alcohol abuse.  

Anyway, I just thought it was kind of cool. I never knew that making music was the single thing that could light up your brain like that, but now it makes me want to go find my old flute from the middle school band or go dust off one of my pianos. 

Do any of you play instruments? Do you think it's the key to a brain that ages well? Let me know in the comments.