Can Playing Music Keep Your Brain Young? A New Study Says Yes.
Wednesday, July16, 2025.
You’re at a bustling restaurant, trying to catch what your granddaughter just said.
It’s like parsing Morse code through a wind tunnel—her voice is there, but it’s competing with clinking silverware, background jazz, and someone asking loudly for the salt.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
One of the most frustrating hallmarks of aging is the growing inability to distinguish speech from noise. It’s not just a matter of hearing—it's about the brain's capacity to focus, filter, and decode.
And a new study out of Toronto and Beijing may have uncovered a lifelong habit that helps: playing music.
A Musical Brain Ages Differently
In a new paper published in PLOS Biology, researchers from Baycrest Academy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that older adults with lifelong musical training process speech in noisy environments more like young adults—at the neural level (Zhang et al., 2025).
Using high-resolution fMRI scans, the team compared the brain activity of:
25 older musicians (average age: 65)
25 older non-musicians (average age: 67)
24 young non-musicians (average age: 23)
The musicians weren’t casual players—they had all started music before age 23, had over 30 years of training, and still practiced about 13 hours per week. And their brains showed it.
Typical Aging: Turning Up the Neural Volume
Normally, when older adults try to interpret speech in a noisy setting, their brains start to “recruit help”—activating more regions than younger adults would.
This is known as neural upregulation. It’s like adding more spotlights to a dark stage. Helpful, maybe, but not efficient.
Dr. Lei Zhang, co-lead author of the study, explains:
“Deterioration of the brain is a major cause of many kinds of age-related cognitive decline. Positive lifestyle choices accumulate neural resources that help the brain cope with aging” (Zhang et al., 2025).
The older non-musicians followed this typical pattern: more brain regions, more effort, more noise in the system.
The Musician’s Advantage: Youthful Efficiency
Now here’s the twist: older musicians didn’t show that same overactivation. Their brains behaved more like the younger group’s—targeted, efficient, and precise. Even better, when musicians did show increased brain activity, their performance got worse.
In other words, their default mode was so optimized that overworking the system was counterproductive.
Musicians also retained youth-like functional connectivity in brain regions involved in hearing and movement. These are the same areas musicians train repeatedly: listening for pitch, coordinating motor skills, timing rhythm. It’s as if the brain said, “Oh, we’ve done this before,” and handled the task with elegant ease.
Cognitive Reserve: Your Brain’s Savings Account
What’s behind this protective effect?
Scientists call it cognitive reserve—the mental resilience built through lifelong learning, effortful practice, and rich sensory experience.
Musicians develop this reserve not just by memorizing scales or sight-reading Bach, but by coordinating complex systems across the brain: auditory, motor, attentional, and emotional. These networks stay flexible and integrated well into later life.
And it’s not just theory. As Dr. Zhang puts it:
“Cognitive reserve enables older musicians to retain youth-like neural activation patterns and preserve their speech-in-noise perception” (Zhang et al., 2025).
Does This Mean You Should Pick Up the Violin at 70?
Actually, yes.
While the participants in this study were lifelong musicians, Dr. Zhang’s previous research found that even late starters can benefit.
The protective effects weren’t strongly linked to age of first training, which challenges the old “use it or lose it by 30” narrative.
That means whether you’re 27 or 72, picking up an instrument is still a solid bet for brain health. Piano, guitar, harmonica—anything that pushes your auditory and motor systems to work in tandem.
It’s not about being good. It’s about being engaged.
Not Just Music: Other Brain-Building Habits
The study also gestures toward a broader truth: how you spend your time matters.
Other activities shown to build cognitive reserve include:
Learning a new language
Regular aerobic exercise
Social connection and conversation
Practicing mindfulness or meditation
Lifelong reading and writing habits
The key is challenge plus pleasure. It has to be difficult enough to stretch the brain but enjoyable enough to keep you coming back.
Aging, Noise, and Loneliness
Struggling to hear in noisy places isn’t just annoying—it can be socially isolating. Older adults may withdraw from group events, family dinners, or public spaces simply because they can’t keep up with the conversation.
That’s why this study matters so much. Musical training doesn’t just preserve auditory cognition—it may help preserve belonging.
In the long symphony of life, maybe the real goal is not to play louder, but to stay in tune.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Zhang, L., Ross, B., Du, Y., & Alain, C. (2025). Long-term musical training can protect against age-related upregulation of neural activity in speech-in-noise perception. PLOS Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002834