While music has the ability to provide consolation and joy, its positive impacts go beyond that. According to SciTechDaily, new research shows that learning how to play a musical instrument may boost brain processing and also enhance one's mood.
Learning How To Play Piano Boosts Brain Processing, Mood
The study was included in Scientific Reports. According to this research, newbies who went through piano lessons worth one hour for 11 weeks exhibited remarkable improvements in detecting auditory and visual alterations within the environment. On top of this, they also reported decreased stress, anxiety, and depression levels.
As part of the study, there were 31 adults that were categorized into the music listening, music training, or control groups. Participants who did not have any musical experience of any sort had to go through one-hour sessions each week. The intervention group, on the other hand, played music while the control group simply listened to music and used the period to finish their homework.
Enhanced Multisensory Processing
Science Daily reports that the specialists observed that in just a few weeks time since lessons started, the capacity of the participants to handle multisensory data had been boosted. This improved capacity helps virtually every activity, including crossing streets, driving cars, or spotting someone within a crowd.
Such impacts went beyond the musical aspect of things. Musical training also increased the accuracy of auditory and visual processing across various tasks. Science Daily notes how recipients of piano lessons exhibited higher accuracy when performing tests wherein they were asked to choose if visual and auditory occurrences took place simultaneously or not.
This was the case across simple and more intricate displays. Such enhanced cognitive capacities were not observed in the music-listening group or the control group.
Reduced Anxiety, Stress, & Depression
The impacts of music learning also went beyond cognition and affected the participant's mood positively. The participants were also seen to have decreased scores in stress, anxiety, and depression post-training compared to pre-training. The researchers suggest how music training may help those struggling with their mental health. Further studies are being conducted to explore such possibilities even more.
Dr. Karin Petrini, a music specialist and cognitive psychologist from the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath, notes that while it is common knowledge that listening and playing music may bring joy, the study focuses more on how music training may impact cognition. Dr. Petrini further notes how learning how to play an instrument is quite a difficult task that requires score reading, movements, and tracking tactile and auditory feedback. Scientifically speaking, the entire process of learning how to play piano uses both auditory and visual cues. This, thus, makes it some sort of multisensory training.
Findings of the study show how such a case may lead to remarkable impacts on brain processing of auditory and visual data even when plasticity decreases during adulthood.
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