Learning Music and Foreign Languages can delay Dementia

Hello everyone who studies music or masters more than one language can increase the effectiveness of our brain.

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Researchers at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest found that musicians and bilingual speakers use less brain energy when needed to complete memory-related work.

In a study published in the Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, it was stated that people who have musical abilities and mastered a second language have activated different brain networks so that their brains move lower when they have to complete work compared to those who have never learned music or not bilingual.

Regarding the discovery, Dr. Claude Alain, one of the authors of a scientific article and senior researcher at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, said: "These findings indicate that the brains of musicians and bilingual people require lower effort to complete the same task, which can protect against cognitive decline and delay dementia. .

"Our findings also reveal that one's experience, both the experience of learning to play musical instruments and learning other languages, can reveal how the brain works and which networks to use."

Musicians and bilingual speakers show that they have better working memory skills, the ability to remember things such as telephone numbers, instructions for use, or quick calculations, but researchers have not been able to identify the cause.

To conduct this study, researchers analyzed 41 people between the ages of 19 and 35 who had categories: non-musician English speakers, musicians who only spoke English, and bilingual non-musicians.

The brain activity of each participant was recorded when they were asked to recognize various sounds produced from musical instruments, the environment, or humans and mention whether each voice was the same as the previous one.

In addition, participants were also asked to identify whether the sound heard came from the same direction as the previous sound.

In that study, musicians were able to remember the type of sound faster than other groups. While bilingual speakers and musicians can better distinguish the direction of the sound coming.

Bilingual groups performed almost the same in remembering sounds with those who spoke English only and non-musicians, but still showed lower brain activity.

"Bilingual brains process the sound for longer because information is channeled through two different language libraries," Dr. Alain concluded. "There is evidence to support this theory that during tests, bilingual brains show signs of greater activity in an area known as the center of word comprehension."