Learning to play music at an early age can strengthen the brain for life

Confused about which class to send the child to?

We may have an answer that will be very useful to him in the future as well.

And we don't exactly mean the programming and electronics department.

So what is it about?

Voila system!

health

08/09/2022

Thursday, 08 September 2022, 09:13 Updated: 09:45

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The year has started, but which class do you send the children to? (Photo: Reuven Castro)

The school year has started but many parents are still confused when it comes to adaptation, and yes, also regarding the classes to which they will send their children.

A new study found a future advantage for one class in particular - the researchers found a connection between learning a musical instrument at a young age and improved thinking skills in adulthood.

The University of Edinburgh study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people with more musical experience showed greater lifelong improvement in a test of cognitive ability than those with less experience, or no experience at all.

The researchers also found that the benefits remained even when taking into account their socioeconomic status, years of education, childhood cognitive ability and health in old age.

But emeritus professor Ian Deary, former director of the university's Center for Cognitive Aging and Cognitive Epidemiology, said: "We must emphasize that the association we found between playing an instrument and lifelong cognitive improvement was small, and that we cannot prove that the former caused the latter. However, while we and others are looking for the effects The many small things that may contribute to the aging of some people's brains in a healthier way than others, it is worth following the results of the study."

Strengthens the brain in the future as well.

A boy plays the guitar (Photo: ShutterStock)

Of the 366 study participants, 117 reported some experience in playing a musical instrument - mainly during childhood and adolescence.

The most common musical instrument was the piano, in addition to other instruments such as the accordion, bagpipe, guitar and violin.

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To the full article

The study participants were a group of people born in 1936 who took part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947. They were tested on a number of physical and mental functions as they got older, including a retest of the standard cognitive ability test they had each taken as an 11-year-old, which included questions requiring verbal reasoning, awareness Spatial and numerical analysis.

Group members who took the test again at age 70 were questioned about their musical experiences during their lives by researchers who wanted to find out if musical experience was associated with healthy aging.

In the study, the team used statistical models to look for connections between a person's experience playing a musical instrument and changes in their thinking skills between the ages of 11 and 70.

The university said the findings provided new evidence that playing a musical instrument is associated with small but detectable lifelong cognitive benefits.

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