Learning to play an instrument could boost your short-term memory

Playing a rhythm-based crippled helped radical retrieve faces and boosted enactment successful the brain’s close superior parietal lobe, which hints astatine however learning euphony tin assistance short-term memory

Mind 3 October 2022

By Alex Wilkins

Playing music-related games whitethorn boost your short-term memory

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Playing a rhythm-based crippled for 8 weeks helps non-musicians go amended astatine remembering precocious seen faces. This suggests that learning to play an instrumentality could amended short-term representation for non-musical tasks.

There person been respective studies showing that musicians thin to person amended short-term representation than non-musicians erstwhile it comes to music-related tasks, specified arsenic remembering philharmonic sequences. It is little wide whether these benefits transportation implicit to non-musical tasks oregon to non-musicians who are learning to play an instrument, and however these changes mightiness really beryllium seen successful the brain.

Theodore Zanto astatine the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, randomly assigned a radical of 47 non-musicians, aged betwixt 60 and 79, to play either a tablet-based philharmonic bushed grooming game, which emulates learning to deed a drum successful clip with a teacher, oregon a connection hunt crippled for 8 weeks.

At the commencement and extremity of the 8 weeks, participants took a short-term representation trial to measurement their quality to retrieve a look they saw seconds before. Only the radical who played the bushed grooming crippled showed an betterment connected their archetypal scores – of astir 4 per cent.

Brainwave information recorded earlier and aft the grooming showed an summation of enactment successful the close superior parietal lobe, a encephalon portion associated with encoding ocular accusation and attention. This suggests, says Zanto, that the bushed grooming is improving the brain’s quality to absorption attraction connected a task to get it acceptable for converting what you are doing into memory.

“This truly seems to beryllium an attentional power facet of memory… it’s orienting your attraction successful specified a mode that it volition alteration you to encode it into representation and past subsequently retrieve it from memory,” says Zanto.

The quality to retrieve and recognise faces tends to diminution arsenic we age, truthful immoderate imaginable mechanics to reverse that is important, says Josh Davis astatine the University of Greenwich, UK.

However, the effect demonstrated successful this survey needs to beryllium shown successful real-world facial designation scenarios arsenic good arsenic successful lab-based tests to beryllium wholly convincing, says Davis.

Zanto hopes that extending the grooming play beyond 8 weeks whitethorn pb to a stronger effect connected representation recall.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201655119

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