Everyone Can Gain from Making Music

The perks of learning to play an instrument last for decades

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Think back to your elementary school music class. You absorbed commands from a baton-wielding conductor while deciphering inky notes on a page. You kept tempo with the rest of the band while your contorted fingers sped from key to key. There is no doubt that musical training is a challenge for the brain. And in the past decade an abundance of studies have found that this effort confers cognitive benefits on all who study music, from toddlers to retirees.

Researchers became interested in the effects of music on the brain when a provocative study in the early 1990s claimed that simply listening to a Mozart sonata could make you brainier—so dubbed the “Mozart effect.” The finding was never confirmed. Various studies followed that showed listening to music has transient effects on cognitive functions such as spatial ability, speed of processing and creative problem solving—but such effects last only about 10 minutes once the music is switched off. Experts continue to debate whether frequently engaging with music has longer-term effects on cognition. In recent years new techniques to measure the brain's response to auditory cues in real time have given researchers valuable data to address the issue. “We can see how these ingredients of sound are processed by the brain,” says Nina Kraus, an auditory neuroscientist at the Northwestern University School of Communication. Today some evidence suggests that musical training may enhance a suite of cognitive functions, including listening, linguistics, focus and memory, along with spatial, motor and mathematical skills.

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