How do musicians keep the brain young and sharp when heading into old age?

Long-term musical training can keep the brain sharp and young, according to a new study led by Chinese researchers.

The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on April 26, discovered the mechanisms underlying cognitive advantages that older musicians tended to have.

The findings provide new insights into how lifelong musical training leads to “successful ageing”, according to the authors.

“China has entered an ageing society. Ageing causes multiple cognitive declines, which are due to changes in brain function and structure,” said Du Yi, the study’s corresponding author and a researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“If we have better interventions that can effectively slow down the ageing process, the older adults can better adapt and we can achieve successful ageing,” she said.

Du and her colleagues previously wrote in a 2016 Nature Communications paper about their discovery that older adults have a reduced ability to understand speech in noisy environments. But they may use the brain’s functional compensation mechanism, which recruits higher cognitive function regions – such as sensorimotor regions – to compensate and help them better understand.

In another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017, they found that musical training could help young musicians better process speech in noisy environments through enhanced compensation by sensorimotor integration functions. Sensorimotor integration refers to the process in which the nervous system coordinates sensory information and motor activity.

“We want to figure out if musical training may also improve functional compensation for older musicians, and thus enhance their understanding,” Du said.

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In the new study, the authors analysed brain activity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 25 older musicians, 25 older non-musicians and 24 young non-musicians.

The older musicians all started musical training as teenagers and had an average 51 years’ training experience, while the non-musicians had less than two years’ musical training experience.

The participants were asked to identify syllables in noisy environments by listening to speech signals and watching a mouth on the screen.

The researchers found that older musicians outperformed older non-musicians and even equalled young non-musicians in identifying audiovisual syllables under noisy conditions, suggesting that musical training can enhance the speech perception of older adults in noisy environments.

Du said speech perception in noise was noteworthy because difficulty understanding people in noisy conditions might lead to social isolation, and even depression.

Moreover, the authors revealed two mechanisms that older musicians adopt to counteract ageing: functional preservation and functional compensation.

Previous studies had proposed these concepts but scientists did not know exactly which brain areas were involved in these functions, Du said.

By studying brain imaging, the authors found the brain’s sensorimotor regions – in the frontal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex – were involved in understanding speech in noisy environments.

Compared to older non-musicians, the functions of the sensorimotor regions of older musicians are preserved at a level similar to that of young non-musicians, according to the authors.

They also found that older musicians showed greater activation in frontoparietal regions, meaning they could better recruit these regions to support the speech perception tasks.

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Du said the team was surprised to find that the brains of older musicians tended to be more inhibited in regions that were not relevant to the task to help avoid interference.

“More importantly, we find that the two mechanisms are interdependent. Functional compensation further supports functional preservation,” she said.

“Playing music makes older adults better listeners by preserving youthful neural patterns as well as recruiting additional compensatory brain regions.

“Our study provides empirical evidence to support that playing music keeps your brain sharp, focused and young. It’s never too late to learn music.”