Learning to play an instrument could boost your short-term memory
Learning to play an instrument could boost your short-term memory
Learning to play an instrument could boost your short-term memory
October 3, 2022
By Alex Wilkins
Summary
This suggests that learning to play an instrument could improve short-term memory for non-musical tasks.
There have been several studies showing that musicians tend to have better short-term memory than non-musicians when it comes to music-related tasks, such as remembering musical sequences.
It is less clear whether these benefits carry over to non-musical tasks or to non-musicians who are learning to play an instrument, and how these changes might actually be seen in the brain.
Theodore Zanto at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, randomly assigned a group of 47 non-musicians, aged between 60 and 79, to play either a tablet-based musical rhythm training game, which emulates learning to hit a drum in time with a teacher, or a word search game for eight weeks.
At the start and end of the eight weeks, participants took a short-term memory test to measure their ability to remember a face they saw seconds before.
This suggests, says Zanto, that the rhythm training is improving the brain's ability to focus attention on a task to get it ready for converting what you are doing into memory.
"This really seems to be an attentional control aspect of memory it's orienting your attention in such a way that it will enable you to encode it into memory and then subsequently retrieve it from memory," says Zanto.
Reference
Wilkins, A. (2022, October 03). Learning to play an instrument could boost your short-term memory. Retrieved October 10, 2022, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2340735-learning-to-play-an-instrument-could-boost-your-short-term-memory/