14 DAY TRIAL // I simply knew that my passion for music would reward me in the future. Apparently, people who experience lifelong musical experiences tend to be more likely to display a delay in the normal aging process, including aspects such as memory loss and impaired hearing.
Until now, most investigators were convinced that neurons responsible for decoding and relaying audio signals in the brain had a path of their own, where decay was unavoidable. What the new data suggest is that musical training can prevent this decay.
The distinct neural timing advantage was discovered by experts at the Northwestern University Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, who investigated a number of old musicians. They measured participants' automatic brain responses to speech sounds, PsychCentral reports.
“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” NU neuroscientist and study co-author Nina Kraus, PhD, explains.