Posted on April 24th, 2022

TO A stranger, I’d probably look like an octopus having a fever dream—my twitchy appendages stomping the hi-hat pedal and whacking the snare when they should be doing something else. To my long-suffering drum teacher, I’m one of countless amateurs he’s guided through a legendary pop-music groove—the intro to Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” played by the inimitable drummer Steve Gadd.

To a neurologist who studies the effects of music on the brain, I’d be another thing entirely—a middle-aged man doing the equivalent of a full-body workout for his gray matter.

That’s not hyperbole. For much of the past two decades, doctors and scientists have been gathering heaps of evidence that not only suggests but flat-out shows how playing music makes your brain function better. From UC San Francisco to Northwestern, from the University of Central Florida to Pitt and others, the findings are as consistent as our brains are complex. The simple—or maybe not so simple—acts of playing scales on a guitar, huffing into a trumpet, and tapping out paradiddles lead to tangible rewards. Playing music can improve memory and cognition, help you hear and understand better in noisy environments, and even serve as an effective tool for treating patients with memory-destroying diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Researchers have also shown that the act of playing music—which includes singing—activates the brain’s limbic center and releases the chemicals, such as dopamine, that make us experience joy. And not just while you’re playing—the benefits can stay with you into old age. What’s more, the physiological and psychological dividends are especially substantial if you’re a novice, or if you’re dusting off an instrument from your youth. Translation: As long as you’re challenged in some small way, being bad at an instrument is good for you.

“I call playing music ‘hitting the jackpot,’ ” says Nina Kraus, Ph.D., a neurobiologist at Northwestern University who recently published Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World. A self-proclaimed multi-instrumentalist “hack,” she plays music every day, even if she lacks expertise and only does it for a few minutes. Playing an instrument in a focused and deliberate manner, she says, “engages so much of your brain, like the cognitive, sensory, motor, and reward systems, in ways that few other activities can.” Like Kraus, I’m a hobbyist. I took lessons on and off as a young teen but lacked the work ethic, the patience, and, as years of therapy and reflection have taught me, the self-esteem required to make mistakes and withhold self-judgment, particularly in front of others. So I gave it up. True to form, I spent the next three decades judging myself for that decision.

Original article: https://www.menshealth.com/health/a38472042/brain-benefits-drums-musical-instruments/