Music training has biological impact on aging process

According to a new study from Northwestern University, age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training. ‘Musician’ participants began musical training before age 9 and engaged consistently in musical activities through their lives, while ‘non-musicians’ had three years or less of musical training. Research showed that musicians outperformed the non-musicians, encoding the stimuli quickly and accurately. Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine commented, “[These findings] support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.” Previous studies from the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical training also offset losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise -- two common complaints of older adults.