Music Training has Biological Impact on
Aging Process
February
04, 2012--Age-related delays in neural
timing are not inevitable and can be avoided
or offset with musical training, according
to a new study from Northwestern University.
The study is the first to provide biological
evidence that lifelong musical experience
has an impact on the aging process.
Measuring the automatic brain responses of
younger and older musicians and
non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers
in the
Auditory
Neuroscience Laboratory discovered
that older musicians had a distinct neural
timing advantage.
“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,”
said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina
Kraus.
“This reinforces the idea that how we
actively experience sound over the course of
our lives has a profound effect on how our
nervous system functions.”
Kraus, professor of communication
sciences in
the School
of Communication and
professor of neurobiology
and physiology in
theWeinberg
College of Arts and Sciences,
is co-author of “Musical experience offsets
age-related delays in neural timing”
published online in the journal “Neurobiology
of Aging.”
“These are very interesting and important
findings,” said Don Caspary, a nationally
known researcher on age-related hearing loss
at Southern Illinois University School of
Medicine. “They support the idea that the
brain can be trained to overcome, in part,
some age-related hearing loss.”
“The new Northwestern data, with recent
animal data from Michael Merzenich and his
colleagues at University of California, San
Francisco, strongly suggest that intensive
training even late in life could improve
speech processing in older adults and, as a
result, improve their ability to communicate
in complex, noisy acoustic environments,”
Caspary added.
Previous studies from Kraus’ Auditory
Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical
training also offset losses in memory and
difficulties hearing speech in noise -- two
common complaints of older adults. The lab
has been extensively studying the effects of
musical experience on brain plasticity
across the life span in normal and clinical
populations, and in educational settings.
However, Kraus warns that the current
study’s findings were not pervasive and do
not demonstrate that musician’s have a
neural timing advantage in every neural
response to sound. “Instead, this study
showed that musical experience selectively
affected the timing of sound elements that
are important in distinguishing one
consonant from another.”
The automatic neural responses to speech
sounds delivered to 87 normal-hearing,
native English-speaking adults were measured
as they watched a captioned video.
“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.
Kraus, who co-authored the study with
Northwestern researchers Alexandra
Parberty-Clark, Samira Anderson and Emily
Hittner, is available at nkraus@northwestern.edu or
at (847) 491-3181. For more about the work
of Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory
on music perception and learning-associated
brain plasticity, visit
http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/.
