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Musical Experience Slows
Aging in the Brain, Study Finds
Alex Gallucci and Anuja
Vaidya, Medill Reports
February 23, 2012
Anuja
Vaidya/MEDILL Researchers recorded
participants' neural response to sound,
comparing the results in musicians with
non-musicians.
Alex Gallucci/MEDILL A hand chime group,
directed by Michael Crisci, practices weekly
at Niles Senior Center.
All those hours spent mastering a musical instrument
and money spent on music classes may reduce
age-related hearing loss, Northwestern University
researchers are reporting.
Researchers at Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience
Laboratory, recorded 87 subjects' neural responses to
sound. A neural response is the change in potential of
a nervous system in response to sound, said Alexandra
Parbery-Clark, doctoral candidate in the Auditory
Neuroscience Laboratory and first author of this
study.
Researchers compared the neural responses of older and
younger musicians. They then compared the responses of
older and younger non-musicians.
“We found that neural aging is less in the musician
population,” said Parbery-Clark, The study was
published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging. It was
made available online in December.
Researchers first tested the subjects to ensure that
everyone had normal hearing. Electrodes were then
attached to their foreheads, earlobes and the top of
their heads, Parbery-Clark said. They were shown a
movie with subtitles and sounds were played in their
ears. Researchers recorded the neural responses to the
sound.
There was a difference in the neural response timing
between the older and younger non-musicians, but this
was not as apparent between the groups of musicians,
Parbery-Clark said. The musicians had learned to play
an instrument at the age of 9 and had been playing
fairly consistently throughout their lives, she
said.
Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience
Laboratory, said that as we grow older our neurons
respond more slowly. Neural timing is important for
transcribing sound, she said. Transcribing is taking
the acoustic features of sound and representing them
in the neural code, said Parbery-Clark.
With normal aging, neural timing slows down, but in
older musicians the neural timing was that of a young
musician, Kraus said.
“We are not talking about people passively listening
to music, but those who actively learn musical
instruments,” she said, “(It’s) just like you are not
going to get physically fit watching sports.”
Seniors often find it hard to hear in noisy spaces, so
they stop communicating and isolate themselves, which
can lead to such problems as depression, added Kraus.
The Niles Senior Center has several seniors engaged in
musical activities. The center has a choral group, a
hand chimes group and a kitchen band. “The leader of
the hand chimes group used to be a music teacher and
he keeps asking us why we are yelling,” said Kathlyn
Williams, program director at the center, “And we
aren’t yelling, we just have a normal speech that is
louder because a lot of people can’t hear us.”
Members of the choral and hand chimes groups also told
her that when they get together with their
non-musician friends they notice sounds such as the
clinking of a tea cup that their friends can’t hear,
Williams added. Sometimes they complain about the TV
being too loud as well, she added.
But this area of research needs more attention. For
example, specific details such as how many years of
training is needed or if there are specific types of
music that are more helpful than others needs to be
investigated, said Kraus.
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