Researchers from Northwestern University found that brain responses to speech are faster among older adults who took childhood music lessons — even if they haven’t touched an instrument in decades.
And the positive effects seemed to be stronger the longer a person took music lessons as a child, the researchers noted.
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And people could stand to benefit from starting music lessons at a very young age, according to another study in the Journal of Neuroscience. That research, conducted by scientists from Concordia University and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University, showed that musical training before age 7 is linked with more white matter in the corpus callosum part of the brain, as well as better performance on visual sensorimotor synchronization tasks compared with people who started music training after age 7.