Musical training improves the perception of audiovisual skills in the middle of noise in adult people because it preserves and stimulates the neural pathways as in a young organism, according to a study published on April 26 in Science Advances magazine.
In the analysis, 25 musicians —including 11 women— of approximately 65 years of age participated, together with another 25 people of around 67 years of age who had not learned or practiced music, plus 24 young people who were also dedicated to this activity.
During the studio, the participants had to identify four audiovisual syllables, emitted in a repetitive way and masked by noise, while looking at the mouth of the person who pronounced them on a screen. So, press the button corresponding to each of the syllables on a keyboard.
The task was performed under less or less intense noise, between three different levels, and within a functional magnetic resonance imaging device. In this way, the scientists established that the first group could recognize better than the other audiovisual signals.
When the experts analyzed the functioning of the 74 participating brains, they detected two mechanisms that people with musical training use involuntarily to face cognitive aging. First, the greater musicians showed a stronger activation of the front-parietal regions of their cerebral cortex. Second, they deactivated several convolutions of the inner part of the brain (such as the angular gyrus, related to the interpretation of human language), something that the team calls “active suppression of irrelevant sensory information”.
“Playing music makes older adults listen better while maintaining juvenile neuronal patrons and recruiting additional compensatory brain regions”, commented one of the study’s authors, Du Yi. Furthermore, he adds that his work “provides empirical evidence to support that playing music keeps the brain alert, young and focused”.
The investigation shows that musical training and the respective practice lead to a higher quality of life in time. In addition, scientists believe that their results could contribute to the elaboration of therapies against cognitive deterioration in people of advanced age.
