A new study published in Science Advances suggests that long-term musical training may counteract age-related decline in the ability to understand speech in noisy environments.
The study, led by Dr. Du Yi from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that musical training helps maintain youthful brain activity patterns and promotes compensatory mechanisms in frontoparietal and default mode network (DMN) regions.
About the Study
The research involved older musicians, older non-musicians, and young non-musicians.
It was observed that older musicians were better at identifying audiovisual syllables under noisy conditions than older non-musicians, performing at a similar level to young non-musicians.
Analyzing their brain activity, the researchers discovered two mechanisms that older musicians adopt to counteract aging: functional preservation and functional compensation.
Results of the Study
Older musicians were found to have retained the neural specificity of speech representations in sensorimotor areas similar to young non-musicians, whereas older non-musicians demonstrated degraded neural representations.
The higher neural alignment in older musicians was associated with their training intensity. This youth-like brain function was linked to better audiovisual speech-in-noise perception performance in older adults.
Moreover, the study found that older musicians showed greater activation in frontoparietal regions and greater inhibition in task-irrelevant DMN regions, which helped avoid interference.
Both of these mechanisms – greater frontoparietal activation and greater DMN inhibition – contributed to the preservation of neural patterns in sensorimotor regions in older adults.
Implications and Conclusions
Dr. Du, the corresponding author of the study, remarked that the findings provided empirical evidence to support that playing music could help keep the brain sharp, young, and focused in older adults.
The study’s results contribute to the understanding of adaptive brain reorganization in aging populations and how lifelong musical training can foster “successful aging” in speech processing.
The findings suggest potential avenues for more targeted training regimens to protect speech functions in elderly individuals.
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The study was published in Science Advances.
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