Learning a musical instrument in your 70s could help protect memory
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- Kyoto University researchers followed older adults (average age 73 at the start) for four years and found that participants who continued practicing a musical instrument maintained verbal working memory, while those who quit showed measurable declines.
- MRI scans revealed that participants who stopped practicing experienced gray matter shrinkage in the right putamen, while those who kept playing did not show the same degree of shrinkage.
- Continued practitioners also showed greater activity across broader areas of both cerebellums compared with those who stopped.
- The four-year study extended findings from a 2020 four-month pilot in which the same participants first took up an instrument; the new work is published in the journal Imaging Neuroscience.
- Corresponding author Kaoru Sekiyama said the team was surprised that brain effects concentrated in the putamen and cerebellum, calling sustained practice "an effective way to prevent age-related decline."
- Sekiyama added that playing an instrument may be especially valuable for older adults who can't engage in physical exercise due to body pain or other problems.
Why it matters: Four years of follow-up suggest sustained practice—not just picking up an instrument—protects working memory and limits putamen shrinkage in older adults. For people who can't do physical exercise, the finding offers a concrete cognitive alternative backed by longitudinal brain imaging, though the evidence still rests on the same cohort from a 2020 pilot.
