Men heeft in een longitudinaal onderzoek voor de eerste keer kunnen vaststellen dat het brein van muzikanten trager veroudert dan van niet-muzikanten.

Neurowetenschapper Nina Kraus, onderzoekster aan Northwestern University stelt : “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. 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.” (bron)

Abstract van het onderzoek dat je hier betalend kan downloaden:

Aging disrupts neural timing, reducing the nervous system’s ability to precisely encode sound. Given that the neural representation of temporal features is strengthened with musical training in young adults, can musical training offset the negative impact of aging on neural processing? By comparing auditory brainstem timing in younger and older musicians and nonmusicians to a consonant-vowel speech sound /da/. we document a musician’s resilience to age-related delays in neural timing.