Inc.
An old, unsnoozed goal, learning an instrument, gets a powerful brain-health push from Kyoto University research.
Want Better Brain Health as You Age? A Surprising New Japanese Study Says Start This 1 Habit, and Never Stop
Author: Bill Murphy Jr.
I’ve kept a running mental checklist of self-improvement ideas over the years. Some of them, I’ve tackled and seen them pay off. Others have been on the list for years, like a reminder you keep snoozing on your phone for days, and then weeks, and maybe even years. Examples:
- I prioritized finding the right person to share my life with and start a family. Not the most romantic way to put this, but it all turned out in the end: Check!
- I worked hard to find work that I enjoy, and that pays the bills, and gives me a sense of fulfillment. Check!
- This one was a bit of an unfulfilled nag for quite a while, but I finally got serious about health and fitness, lost most of the weight I needed to, and started paying attention to nutrition, the gym, and sports. Check!
Oh, and as a supposedly literary person, I suppose it should bother me that “read Middlemarch, Ulysses, and Infinite Jest” are still on the to-do list.
Still, I don’t think I’ve done too badly. In fact, there is only one exception: I’ve never learned a musical instrument.
Full-grown human relatives
At some point in grade school, I took piano lessons for less than a year, but I quit. My dad is a pretty good jazz pianist, so I suppose he wouldn’t have minded if I’d kept at it — but it just wasn’t for me.
And “hey, maybe you should try guitar or violin or trumpet or mandolin” or something has been on my list so long that I now have entire full-grown human relatives who are very accomplished musicians — and who weren’t even born when I first started thinking about the idea.
A new study from Kyoto University says: maybe yes, and maybe no.
The study followed participants from a 2020 project in which older adults — average age 73 at the start — learned to play a musical instrument for the first time.
After an initial four-month training period, about half continued practicing for more than three years, while the other half stopped and moved on to different hobbies. Four years later, everyone came back for MRI scans and cognitive assessments.
Results:
- Participants who stopped practicing showed declines in verbal working memory and measurable shrinkage in a brain region called the right putamen — an area tied to memory and learning that commonly deteriorates with age.
- Those who kept playing showed neither decline. The cerebellum, another region typically vulnerable to aging, also showed greater activity in the group that continued.
“We were surprised to find that the effects on the brains of elderly people who start and continue practicing an instrument were also concentrated in these two areas of the brain, and that this was an effective way to prevent age-related decline,” said corresponding author Kaoru Sekiyama.
Whom are you calling “elderly”?
I’m not exactly “elderly” — still a long way off, I’d like to think — but it got me thinking.
Most brain studies measure what happens when people start something. This one did the opposite; it measured what happened when people stopped.
Bottom line: The benefits didn’t accumulate and hold; they required continued practice to maintain. All of which makes picking up an instrument seem like a compounding habit — the same way exercise is — you don’t get to bank the gains and coast.
“For those who struggle to engage in physical activity due to body pain or other problems, playing musical instruments can be a great alternative,” Sekiyama said.
Now, this is a small follow-up study — a subset of an already modest 2020 cohort — and people who kept playing may differ from those who stopped in ways the study doesn’t fully control for. Motivation, general health, and lifestyle could all be factors.
But the headline finding is: “It’s never too late to start playing an instrument, and starting in old age may have major benefits.”
The adults involved here had an average age of 73, and they started from scratch and showed measurable brain benefits after four months — so “it’s too late for me” is a long way off too.
I’m not rushing out to buy a guitar or a keyboard. But I’m thinking about it more than I was last week.
Right after I finish Middlemarch.
Credits: TCA, LLC.