The NY Times contains a Science section on Tuesdays, and it always has delightful tidbits. Today Sindya N. Bhanoo writes that if you had music lessons at a young age, the experience may benefit you in old age.
“A new study reports that older adults who took lessons at a young age can process the sounds of speech faster than those who did not.
“ ‘It didn’t matter what instrument you played, it just mattered that you played,’ said Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which appears in The Journal of Neuroscience.
“She and her collaborators looked at 44 healthy adults ages 55 to 76, measuring electrical activity in a region of the brain that processes sound.
“They found that participants who had four to 14 years of musical training had faster responses to speech sounds than participants without any training — even though no one in the first group had played an instrument for about 40 years.” More here.
Now, of course, I am looking back and trying to count how many years of piano lessons I had as a kid. I’m sure it was at least the four Kraus deems necessary. But I hardly ever practiced, so probably the effect was small.
The serious pianist below was sitting on my lap when the picture was taken in 2011.
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