How Playing an Instrument Benefits Your Brain

This video explores the cognitive benefits of playing a musical instrument, highlighting how it engages multiple areas of the brain simultaneously. It discusses how playing music enhances brain functions, improves problem-solving skills, and fosters creativity by strengthening the corpus callosum, the bridge between the brain's hemispheres.

Pause the video now if you'd like to read more about how playing an instrument benefits your brain. Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? On the outside, they may look calm and focused, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required. Inside their brains, there's a party going on. How do we know this? Well, in the last few decades, neuroscientists have made enormous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work by monitoring them in real time with instruments like fMRI and PET scanners. When people are hooked up to these machines, tasks such as reading or doing math problems each have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed. But when researchers got the participants to listen to music, they saw fireworks. Multiple areas of their brains were lighting up at once as they processed the sound, took it apart to understand elements like melody and rhythm, and then put it all back together into a unified musical experience. Our brains do all this work in the split second between when we first hear the music and when our foot starts to tap along. But when scientists turned from observing the brains of music listeners to those of musicians, the little backyard fireworks became a jubilee. It turns out that while listening to music engages the brain in some pretty interesting activities, playing music is the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout. The neuroscientists saw multiple areas of the brain light up, simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly fast sequences. But what is it about making music that sets the brain alight? Research is still fairly new, but neuroscientists have a pretty good idea. Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. And as with any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. The most obvious difference between listening to music and playing it is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which are controlled in both hemispheres of the brain. It also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision in which the left hemisphere is more involved with the novel and creative content that the right excels in. For these reasons, playing music has been found to increase the volume and activity in the brain's corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing messages to get across the brain faster and through more diverse routes. This may allow musicians to solve problems more effectively and creatively in both academic and social settings.