Musical Training Keeps Your Brain Young and Improves Listening Skills, Says Study

Long-term musical training can improve audiovisual speech perception in aging adults by preserving and compensating for youthful neural patterns, according to a neuroimaging study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study found that older musicians outperformed older non-musicians and even equaled young non-musicians in identifying audiovisual syllables under noisy conditions. The research reveals two mechanisms that older musicians use to counteract age-related decline: functional preservation and functional compensation, providing hope for targeted interventions to promote healthy aging.