Tuning up your brain

Did your parents insist that you learn a musical instrument when you were young? Did you harbour suspicions that they just wanted to have you occupied for an hour a day or perhaps that they were secretly masters of refined forms of torture? In reality your parents were probably motivate entirely by love and, even if they did not know it, they were actually doing you a favour beyond learning to play Clair de Lune.

In new research musicians were compared to non-musicians as they were asked to complete simple tasks. The musicians were sub-divided into four groups according to the number of hours they had spent practising their instrument over a lifetime. The groups were; high (over 5,000 hours), intermediate (2,000 to 5,000 hours), low (200 to 2,000 hour) and “no” (under 200 hours).

In a session lasting two hours each of the subjects were tested for reaction times to simple mental tasks and physiological measurements were also taken. The mental tasks included things like the Stroop Test in which subjects are presented with names of colours shown in colours that do not necessarily match. So “blue” might be shown in the colour red. This establishes a conflict n the mind of the person who has been asked to name the colour of each word as it appears. The researchers wanted to measure accuracy, reaction times, and also the amount of post-error adjustment that occurred.

The results showed that the more hours of musical practise a subject had done the faster were their responses with no loss in accuracy. The researchers say this shows that more hours of musical practise lead to better control of the mind as well as an improved ability to recognise mistakes and go back and adjust them. Musicians after all do need to learn to be aware of their performance but need to be able to move ahead regardless of mistakes.

It is not exactly a “Mozart effect” but it does show that the skills involved in learning a musical instrument translate into a brain that ages better. If you do want your brain to age well then it be worth taking note.