Music Training Could Help Hearing In Old Age, Study Shows

Those violin lessons you took a kid could have a big payoff later in life, according to new research from Northwestern University researchers.

Scientists reported in the Neurobiology of Aging study that "aging disrupts neural timing, reducing the nervous system's ability to precisely encode sound." However, they found that lifelong musical training could help people have better hearing in old age.

Researchers found that the older people who were trained in music had better neural timing than those who hadn't been trained in music.

The study included 87 adults who were asked to watch a captioned video. Their neural responses to the sounds of speech were measured. The lifelong musicians were defined as those who were trained in music before age 9, and who participated in musical activities throughout life, while "non-musicians" included everyone who had a year or less of musical training, researchers said.

PsychCentral reported:

[Researchers] discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage. This was determined by measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds.

"The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians," study researcher Nina Kraus, of Northwestern, said in a statement. "This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions."

Previously, research has shown that taking music lessons helps keep the brain sharp when it comes to memory and mental tasks. That research was published in the journal Neuropsychology.

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Comments

[dpkjj]

06:21 PM on 02/01/2012

This is fascinating to me, as I have noticed that, as I get older, my hearing has diminished with respect to speech, but hardly at all with respect to music. (I have played an instrument and sung with choruses and choirs since childhood.)

[fbaur]

11:27 PM on 02/01/2012

DPKJJ,
As we age, hearing loss develops in such a way that as pitch gets higher, our hearing thresholds get worse (Presbycusis- hearing loss due to the aging process). This high-frequency hearing loss affects your ability to perceive the softer parts of speech (ie. ch, s, t, sh, etc...) or the parts of words that allow you to tell "what" someone is saying. Speech understanding information. I can hear you talking, stop mumbling, speak clearly. This is what you often hear from people with a high-frequency hearing loss. Factor in background noise, and it is much more difficult to pick out those speech sounds amidst that noise. Your signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically reduced or turned upside-down. The spectral makeup of music is different than speech, so you may do fine listening to whatever genre you like. Today's hearing aid technology is much easier to make successful for this most-common type of hearing loss. Hope this helps.

[dpkjj]

02:13 PM on 02/02/2012

Thank you for generously sharing this information. It rings true and helps to explain my puzzlement - and delight - about the lack of hearing loss with respect to music.

Yes, the higher the pitch, the worse it is. These days, it's more difficult, because most of the younger females have adopted the high, fast, "uptalk." I might try a hearing aid, but so far I am perfectly fine in most conversational situations. A lot of friends and acquaintances have tried hearing aids, and are not happy with them.

Also, I beieve there is a "processing" slowdown - it's not always hearing loss. For example, people with accents or people who talk very fast are more difficult to understand than they used to be. I attribute that to brain processing rather than actual hearing.