2023-04-29 21:26:05
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Research shows that musical training and related practice lead to a higher quality of life in old age.
Musical training improves the perception of audiovisual speech in the midst of noise in adults because it preserves and stimulates neural patterns as in a young organism, according to a study published April 26 in the journal Science Advances.
Twenty-five musicians, including 11 women, of approximately 65 years of age participated in the analysis, along with another 25 people of around 67 years of age who had not learned or practiced music, plus 24 young people who were not engaged in this activity either.
During the study, the participants had to identify four audiovisual syllables, emitted repetitively and masked by noise, while looking at the mouth of the person who pronounced them on a screen. Thus, they had to press the button corresponding to each of the syllables on a keyboard.
The task was performed under more or less intense noise, at three different levels, and within a functional magnetic resonance imaging device. In this way, the scientists established that the first group was able to recognize audiovisual signals better than the others.
When the experts analyzed the functioning of the 74 participating brains, they detected two mechanisms that people with musical training involuntarily use to cope with cognitive aging. First, the older musicians showed stronger activation of the frontoparietal regions of their cerebral cortex. Second, they turned off various convolutions in the inner part of the brain (such as the angular gyrus, related to the interpretation of human language), something the team calls “active suppression of irrelevant sensory information.”
“Playing music makes older adults better listeners by maintaining youthful neural patterns and recruiting additional compensatory brain regions,” said one of the study authors, Du Yi. In addition, he added that his work “provides empirical evidence to support that playing music keeps the brain alert, young and focused.”
Research shows that musical training and related practice lead to a higher quality of life in old age. In addition, the scientists believe that their results might contribute to the development of therapies once morest cognitive decline in the elderly.
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