Music Against Time: Playing An Instrument Can Keep Your Brain Young

Studies show that as we age, our brains try to compensate for cognitive losses by increasing their activity. People who have had enriching experiences throughout their lives, such as playing musical instruments, develop a "cognitive reserve" that helps their brains function more efficiently. Elderly musicians, for example, understand speech better in noisy environments and use their brains more similarly to younger people. This suggests that musical training can help the brain age more healthily.

As we age, it's common to see a decline in our sensory abilities, such as vision and hearing, as well as in cognitive abilities, such as memory, attention, and reasoning. These declines are part of natural aging.

To compensate for these losses, the brains of older people tend to increase activity in certain regions, as well as establish stronger connections between different brain areas. This is a kind of brain strategy to maintain performance as close as possible to what it was in youth.

However, this pattern of functioning can vary depending on the task performed or the type of stimulus used in aging studies.

Researchers believe that this increased brain activity in older adults functions as a form of compensation. In other words, the brain is "working harder" to maintain the same results. This compensation can occur automatically or as a result of a conscious effort on the part of the individual.

There is a theory, called the posterior-anterior shift model, which suggests that, during cognitive tasks, older adults more intensely activate brain regions linked to planning and control, located in the frontal region. In younger people, these same regions tend to be less intensely activated or not even required for the same tasks.

However, not all older adults activate these regions with the same intensity. This depends on something called "cognitive reserve," a kind of "mental savings" that each person accumulates throughout life through enriching experiences such as quality education, bilingualism, or, in this case, musical training.

The theory, called "Scaffolding Theory," suggests that positive habits and experiences throughout life help build this cognitive and cerebral reserve. Thus, people who have learned music, spoken more than one language, or had extended education tend to develop additional brain mechanisms that help the brain better cope with aging.

According to this view, individuals with greater cognitive reserve could present more efficient brain activation, which could be reflected in better performance during challenging tasks, such as understanding speech in noisy environments, something that is often difficult for many older adults.

However, there is still some uncertainty about exactly how this cognitive reserve influences brain function in old age. Some studies suggest that more experienced people (such as musicians, for example) use their brains more efficiently, with less effort and activating fewer regions.

Other studies indicate that these people activate more areas of the brain, as if they had greater functional capacity. To date, few studies have explored this topic with a specific focus on older adults.

In this study, the researchers decided to investigate precisely this: how long-term musical training can affect the brains of older adults, especially during challenging auditory tasks, such as understanding syllables amid noise.

Music is an activity that requires the integration of different senses and areas of the brain, listening, moving fingers, reading music, maintaining rhythm, among other things. Therefore, it serves as an excellent model for understanding how the brain adapts to prolonged experiences.

It is already known, for example, that musicians tend to have sharper auditory perception, more efficient communication between brain regions, and better performance in tasks involving sounds, even in old age.

The study compared three groups: elderly musicians, older adults who had never played instruments, and young adults with no musical training. All participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while performing a task: identifying syllables amid noise at varying intensities.

The goal was to see how the brain reacted to this challenging situation and whether there were clear differences between the groups, especially in how brain regions connected and activated.

The researchers carefully analyzed the connections between brain regions involved in hearing, speech, and movement, areas known to help integrate sound and action, which is essential for both playing instruments and understanding speech amidst noise.

Furthermore, the study observed not only what happened during the task, but also how these brain areas behaved at rest, that is, when the participants were simply lying on the device, not performing any activity.

Based on these analyses, the scientists proposed two hypotheses. The first, called the "reinforcement compensation hypothesis," suggests that people with greater cognitive reserve (such as older musicians) would show even more brain activation than non-musicians, as an amplified form of compensation.

The second hypothesis, called "upregulation by retention," suggests that these people wouldn't even need to activate their brains as much, as their cognitive reserve already ensures functioning closer to that of a young person, as if the reserve worked to maintain performance without requiring extra effort from the brain.

The results showed that the elderly musicians activated certain auditory areas less intensely than the non-musicians during the task. Still, they performed better. This suggests that their brains are functioning more efficiently, as predicted by the retention hypothesis.

Furthermore, the way the elderly musicians' brains were wired was more similar to that of young adults than that of other older adults. In other words, long-term musical training appears to help the brain maintain a "youthful structure," even as we age.

This image shows two main ideas about how the brains of older people try to adapt to aging. At the top (A and B), we see that older people tend to use their brains more (greater neural activity) to compensate for natural losses with age (A), and that people with greater "cognitive reserve," such as those who have had good life experiences, such as playing instruments, have more brain resources to deal with these losses (B). Below (C and D), two hypotheses are compared. In "Bolster compensation" (C), older people with reserve activate their brains even more and perform better. In "Hold-back upregulation" (D), those with reserve need to use their brains less because they are already more efficient, showing neural use more similar to that of younger people. Both hypotheses attempt to explain how life experiences can help the brain age better.

These findings are important because they show that a lifelong lifestyle, especially continued musical practice, can protect the brain against the effects of aging.

The brains of older musicians showed greater efficiency, preserved connectivity, and better cognitive performance in a challenging task. This reinforces the idea that the cognitive reserve accumulated through rich experiences, such as learning music, can help the brain age more healthily and functionally.

READ MORE:

Long-term musical training can protect against age-related upregulation of neural activity in speech-in-noise perception

Lei Zhang, Bernhard Ross, Yi Du, and Claude Alain 

PLoS Biol 23(7): e3003247.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003247

Abstract: 

During cognitive tasks, older adults often show increased frontoparietal neural activity and functional connectivity. Cognitive reserve accrued from positive life choices like long-term musical training can provide additional neural resources to help cope with the effect of aging. However, the relationship between cognitive reserve and upregulated neural activity in older adults remains poorly understood. In this study, we measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a speech-in-noise task and assessed whether cognitive reserve accumulated from long-term musical training bolsters or holds back age-related increase in neural activity. Older musicians exhibited less upregulation of task-induced functional connectivity than older non-musicians in auditory dorsal regions, which predicted better behavioral performance in older musicians. Furthermore, older musicians demonstrated more youth-like spatial patterns of functional connectivity, as compared to older non-musicians. Our findings show that cognitive reserve accrued through long-term music training holds back age-related neural recruitment during speech-in-noise perception and enlighten the intricate interplay between cognitive reserve and age-related upregulated activity during cognitive tasks.